China has released technical guidelines on the ethics and safety of artificial intelligence applications, proposing a Chinese approach that emphasizes human-centered development, AI for good, and human leadership over AI systems.
The document, titled “Ethics and Safety Guidelines for Artificial Intelligence Applications 1.0,” was released on Tuesday at a sub-forum of the 2026 China Internet Civilization Conference in Nanning, the capital of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.
The guidelines, published by the National Technical Commission on Cybersecurity 260, China’s main body responsible for cybersecurity standardization, are described as a “principles-based reference technical document.” These guidelines cover the development, service provision, and use of AI applications and provide guidance to organizations and individuals carrying out AI-related activities.
The document was drafted by key Chinese institutions and companies, including Tsinghua University, China Institute of Electronic Standardization, technology giants Alibaba Group and Huawei Technologies, and well-known AI company DeepSeek.
It outlines key principles such as reasonable risk management, openness and transparency, privacy and security protection, control and trust, agile co-governance, and inclusive sharing.
Fan Kefeng, deputy director of the China Electronic Standards Association, said AI applications are expanding from content generation to decision support, interactive control and other fields. With the emergence of new forms such as intelligent agents and integrated AI systems, AI applications are becoming increasingly autonomous, complex and impactful, he said.
“While AI has improved production efficiency, it has also made ethical and safety issues, such as turnover, decision-making responsibility, and emotional dependence, more prominent,” Huang said, adding that these changes are posing new challenges to human agency, social trust, and public order.
The guidelines state that AI applications should always serve the “common well-being of humanity” and call for human control, emergency response and intervention mechanisms to be established at critical stages to ensure “human control over AI applications remains”.
The document also calls on stakeholders to maintain “human judgment, oversight, intervention, and modification” in key processes to avoid excessive replacement of human decision-making by AI.
Users are encouraged to use AI in moderation and to have a proper understanding of AI emotional services. It states that AI should be treated as a “tool that supports real life,” and calls for people to avoid becoming overly dependent on it or relying on it, or replacing real interpersonal communication and activities with AI.
For information and communication services, the guidelines call for stronger risk governance of AI-generated and recommended content, warning against “information cocooning, cognitive misinterpretation, and cognitive decline.”
The guidelines improve the security capabilities of open source ecosystems while also encouraging the creation of open source innovation ecosystems.
Zhang Linghan, director of the Institute of AI Law and Governance, China University of Political Science and Law, said the guidelines provide a detailed path and China’s approach to prevent ethical and safety risks as AI is increasingly integrated into production and daily life, reshaping the relationship between humans and machines, and being applied to more complex scenarios.
He said the guidelines emphasize that human leadership must not be undermined.
Beyond interpersonal and sociopolitical relationships, we also address ecological issues. “We also take into account the energy and resource consumption of AI,” said Chan, who is also an expert on the United Nations’ High-Level Advisory Group on Artificial Intelligence.
Zhou Jingren, partner and senior AI executive at Alibaba Group, said AI technology and large-scale language models are still under rapid development. He said that from the beginning, Alibaba set up an ethics committee for large-scale language models and invited experts from various fields to jointly explore solutions in this emerging field.
Chen Zhixin Contributed to this story.
Please contact the author at jiangchenglong@chinadaily.com.cn.
