Thousands of Companies Are Driving China’s AI Boom. A Government Registry Tracks Them All
When DeepSeek burst on the world stage in January 2025, it seemed to appear out of nowhere. But the great language model was only one of thousands generative AI tools released in China since 2023 – and there's a public archive of every one of them.
The country's top internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), requires any company launching an AI tool with “public opinion characteristics or social mobilization capabilities” to first submit it to a public database: the algorithm registry. In a submission, developers must show how their products avoid 31 risk categories, from age and gender discrimination to psychological harm to “violation of core socialist values.”
Applicants submit their application to their local CAC (say, the Shanghai CAC for Shanghai-registered companies), which forwards applications to the central CAC for final approval. Only then is a tool publicly listed in the algorithm registry. While the European Union is pursuing a single, comprehensive AI law, notes Matt Sheehan, a research scientist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, China's approach to regulation is ad hoc, focused on specific algorithms and building iterative standards. (The US has no comparable registration system or centralized regulatory agency.)
Over time, the CAC has inadvertently created the most detailed map of a nation's AI ecosystem anywhere in the world.
* Current data as of April 2025 includes both “generative AI” and “deep synthesis” algorithms
Open the CAC's August 2024 update and you'll find DeepSeek listed as entry 152, a single row in a neatly packed table. Scroll through the table and you will find an AI that manages homestays and an AI that design patents. One assists ob-gyns in a Shanghai maternity ward; another helps manage state networks. Kendra Schaefer and her colleagues at Trivium China, a Beijing-based policy consultancy, have compiled the CAC's updates into a comprehensive database, enriched with their own research.
A wide view of the Boom
Almost 80 percent of China's generative AI registrations are clustered in and around its top tech hubs – Beijing, Shenzhen, Shanghai and Hangzhou. Each city has its strengths: of Beijing elite universities, national laboratories, and political power give it an edge in large-scale innovation; Shenzhen (in Guangdong) is home to a close hardware supply chain and large pool of engineering talent; Shanghai, close to multinationals, excels in commercialization; and Hangzhou (in Zhejiang) is powered by Alibaba's e-commerce empire.
But innovation spread far beyond the shores. Chongqing is positioning itself as an AI production and logistics hub; and heavy state investment has helped Hefei, in Anhui Province, to become known as “China's speech valley” for its cluster of speech-recognition companies, including iFlyTek. Applications are also coming from less obvious regions such as Guizhou, China's “Big Data Valley,” where massive data centers power Huawei's Pangu model, and Inner Mongolia, where state-owned companies are integrating AI into mining and agriculture.
* Data current as of April 2025
In the Trivium dataset, state-linked listings—from state-owned enterprises to government-backed research institutes—make up 22 percent of listings. Many state-linked companies are collaborating with Big Tech to build their AI: PetroChina, for example, worked together with Huawei and iFlyTek to create oil and gas applications; State Grid uses DeepSeek to build a model optimizing power grids.
Foreign companies make up only 0.5 percent of applications. For example, Ikea has a smart shopper algorithm that generates product recommendations. Yum China, the parent company that operates Kentucky Fried Chicken in China, has called a model that generates menus and promotional materials.
Zero in on the competition
* Data current as of April 2025
More than half of the ads in the algorithm registry are for what Schaefer calls cross-sector technologies. These range from basic models to “general purpose” text generators to a wide range of multimedia tools – voice changers, 3D renderers, image creators. “No one wants to be caught in a situation where they are dependent on a competitor's technology,” says Schaefer. Unlike in the US, where OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind dominate the market, China's competition to build fundamental AI remains diverse and contested. But building these models is expensive, and the market is starting to consolidate. China's Six”AI tigers“—Moonshot, Minimax, Zhipu, Baichuan, 0.1AI, and Stepfun—are all backed by Alibaba or Tencent. ByteDance's Doubao has surpassed DeepSeek as China's most popular chatbot, but its place at the top is uncertain.
Niche Natives
While the giants are figuring out chatbot supremacy, startups are hard at work in every sector imaginable.
Squirrel AI 松鼠
Founder Derek Li says his 12-year-old company has leapfrogged the ed-tech competition. They “put wheels on a horse,” he says, bolting AI onto their existing stale software. Squirrel claims to diagnose knowledge gaps, measure progress and adjust lessons in real time.
When China banned for-profit tutoring in 2021, the company's revenue collapsed overnight. It turned to license its platform to franchisees who also sold the company's AI-powered tablets. Squirrel's network contains more than 3,000 centers across China, serving 1.2 million students. Now the company is looking at expansion to the US.
Lee, who his sons withdrew of a private school in Shanghai so that they could be homeschooled on Squirrel's platform, says that “in the future, teachers will not learn knowledge.” Instead, he says, “they will become data analysts, learning reports and understanding students' abilities, and psychologists, understanding emotions and shaping their personalities.”
AI Kanshe 看舌
AI Kanshe (translated as “AI Sees Tongue”) is a traditional Chinese medicine startup that analyzes health through images of the tongue, palms and face. The company was founded by Li Wenhua, a former employee of Yaoshi Bang, one of China's earliest online pharmaceutical platforms. A longtime student of tongue and hand diagnosis, Li wanted to combine the diagnostic methods of traditional Chinese medicine with modern machine vision. The company serves both consumers and health practitioners in clinics, pharmacies and some hospitals, offering tools to support diagnosis and decision-making. The model is trained on more than 100,000 annotated images of tongues, hands and faces.
Zhongtan Puhui Cloud Technology
Founded in 2024 by Wu Song, a former Wall Street quant trader, Zhongtan Puhui Cloud Technology develops AI-powered tools for carbon accounting. The green transition, Wu says, still relies on cumbersome human labor that could be automated.
Zhongtan Puhui is building AI agents that handle a number of carbon accounting tasks, including carbon footprinting and emissions audits. Their clients range from China Minmetals Group and DHL to small and medium-sized exporters in the Yangtze River Delta.
