What US tech wants, China already has

Since July 15, 2026, a chatbot in China must remind its user, every two hours, that it is talking to a machine. The obligation sits in the Interim Measures on anthropomorphic artificial intelligence interactive services, issued by the Cyberspace Administration of China. Providers must disclose that the interlocutor is synthetic, intervene when a user shows dependence, and keep minors away from virtual romance without parental consent. ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent have already trimmed or switched off companion features. One may find the rule paternalistic, or quaint, or shrewd. What one cannot call it is absent.

That is worth remembering when reading what American artificial intelligence companies are now asking of their own government.

Down the years, the leaders of these companies have warned that their products could cause catastrophic harm, and have asked governments to act. Sam Altman of OpenAI told the United States Senate in May 2023 that regulation of artificial intelligence was essential. Dario Amodei of Anthropic has proposed independent evaluators embedded inside companies, followed by regulation, followed by coordination among democratic states. In these accounts, the world is only beginning to confront the problem, and China figures as the difficult last participant in a governance system the United States and its allies must first build.

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