China's NDRC speeds AI law covering DeepSeek, Alibaba, Moonshot

China's economic planner said on November 3 that it will accelerate a comprehensive AI law and set safety standards covering the full lifecycle of AI, with domestic frontier developers including DeepSeek, Moonshot and Alibaba in the frame. The announcement came from Wang Ruomeng, a senior official at the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), Bloomberg reported.

Wang said Beijing would legislate on data, computing power and algorithms, and set "safety standards and ethical guidelines covering the full life cycle of AI," per a readout in The Edge. He pitched the project as cooperative rather than domestic: AI safety, he said, "is not a problem one company, industry or country can tackle alone."

The planned regime would require developers and operators to disclose safety risks and report incidents and vulnerabilities, paired with sector-specific regulatory sandboxes and transition periods for compliance. The named frontier developers are the same Chinese labs building against OpenAI and Anthropic, which places them inside the first bite of the regime.

The announcement follows a China-US AI agreement reached in September and AI discussions at the recent Trump-Xi summit in Washington. It also lands on a busy regulatory day on our China AI tracker, which has logged 292 pieces over the last 90 days.