China Is Building an Identity Registry for AI Agents
China has unveiled an identity registration and resolution platform for artificial intelligence agents at the Wuzhen summit, and 20 organisations including Huawei, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi and Baidu signed a self discipline convention for how those agents should be built and connected.
The platform is meant to give an agent a verifiable identity the way a phone number or a bank account has one. According to the reports from the forum, national level bodies are building it jointly to handle identity coding, cross domain resolution and trusted interoperability, with operating platforms layered on top to host agent access and to publish what each agent can do.
But the design is still on the drawing board. A pilot programme for agent interoperability has connected several operating platforms and service providers, which is the stage where a registry proves it can resolve an identity held on someone else's system rather than only its own.
Ant Group is among the first participants. It has plugged its agent collaboration infrastructure into an operating platform, and two early services, an Alipay agent for government services and Sesame Credit, have completed trusted links with agents running elsewhere.
And the argument from the company is about liability rather than convenience. Chen Liang, a vice president of Ant Group and chief technology officer of its Alipay and security business group, said the agent era needs trust infrastructure that builds identity, authorization and responsibility into every connection, and pointed to the APASS unified identity account and the ASL protocol Ant is developing with more than 20 partners.
And the convention is the softer half of the same push. It was drafted by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology with Huawei, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi, Baidu, Volcano Engine, Ant Group and Douyin, and sets out eight commitments covering trust systems, interconnection infrastructure, interoperability, security protection, governance, user rights, industry adoption and open sharing of technology.
Those commitments carry specifics that matter to engineers. Signatories pledge to build rule embedding and compliance testing into their agents, to resist the use of agents for algorithmic exploitation and fraud, and to work toward shared standards on registration, capability discovery, intent translation, routing and protocol compatibility.
So the regulator's framing is the part to read closely. Wang Jingtao, a deputy director of the Cyberspace Administration of China, which hosted the forum with the GSMA, called for basic rules on agent identity, trusted interconnection, authorization management and compliant operation, describing a shift from governing content and models to governing verifiable actors, controllable behaviour and traceable responsibility.
So for companies selling agents into China the practical consequence is a registration step that arrives before the commercial one. An agent that cannot be resolved by the national platform, or whose operator has not signed up to the convention, will find it harder to reach the services that sit behind Alipay, and the signatories have said they will accept oversight from industry bodies and the public.
But that is a different model from the one taking shape in Europe, where obligations fall on the deployer of a system and are enforced after the fact. Beijing is building the plumbing first, an identity layer that makes an agent findable and accountable before it transacts, and letting the market decide what runs on top.
China unveiled an identity registration and resolution platform for AI agents at the Wuzhen summit
20 organisations including Huawei, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi and Baidu signed a self discipline convention
The platform is still being built, with a pilot connecting several operating platforms
Ant Group has connected an Alipay government services agent and Sesame Credit to the pilot
The convention sets eight commitments, from shared registration standards to compliance testing
Source: Pandaily
