China
AI behavior law: bot and agent disclosure, crawler and training-data rules, automated-agent transactions, and algorithmic decision-making.
Summary
China presents the highest-risk crawling environment: all six access contexts carry restricted-to-prohibited verdicts. Criminal Law Arts. 285/286 are broadly construed — bypassing rate-limits, CAPTCHAs, or robots.txt prohibitions has been treated as criminal in practice (iDataAPI case, 2024). The Generative AI Measures 2023 Art. 7 require training data to come from 'legitimate sources' and list robots.txt violation as non-compliant, giving robots.txt statutory weight. No TDM copyright exception exists (Copyright Law 2020 Art. 24 closed list). The Anti-Unfair Competition Law (AUCL) 2025 Art. 13 data-competitive-interest doctrine is the dominant civil enforcement tool (Sina Weibo v. Maimai; Dianping v. Baidu; Taobao v. Meijing; iDataAPI 2024). PIPL applies extraterritorially and is strict; cross-border data restrictions are severe.
Automated-access legality
Carried forward from the crawler-law index. Governs whether automated clients may access public websites in this jurisdiction.
| Dimension | Value |
|---|---|
| Authorization test | broad criminal |
| Public-page carve-out | no |
| Terms-of-service browsewrap enforceable | yes |
| Terms-of-service clickwrap enforceable | yes |
| Copyright exception model | closed list |
| Text and data mining — commercial status | prohibited |
| Text and data mining — opt-out mechanism | none |
| robots.txt legal weight | statutory |
| AI training-specific law | binding |
| Privacy regime | PIPL |
| Trespass to chattels | not recognized |
Last reviewed: 2026-05-21. Confidence: medium. Fast-moving area — verify before relying. Not legal advice.