ChinaAnti-Unfair Competition Law, 2025 revision, Article 13 (data scraping and technical circumvention clause)
Anti-Unfair Competition Law of the People's Republic of China (as amended 2025), Art. 13
In force since .
An unfair competition rule binding private bodies.
- Audit expectation
- none
What it requires
- Do not obtain or use data lawfully held by another business operator by fraud, coercion, or by evading or destroying that operator's technical access controls.
- This duty applies whether or not the collected data is later used to train an AI model.
- It has applied in China since , and no case has yet applied it.
These lines are LexLint's reading of the law's text.
In the frameworks
- NIST AI RMF
- MAP 4.1Approaches for mapping AI technology and legal risks of its components – including the use of third-party data or software – are in place, followed, and documented, as are risks of infringement of a third party’s intellectual property or other rights.
Our reading of where this law's duties sit in each framework. It never says that running a control meets the law. How we read a framework against the law
Who enforces it
Settledness
- As of
- Open questions
- Does 避开或者破坏技术管理措施 ("evading or destroying technical management measures") reach a robots.txt directive or a rate limit that blocks nothing technically?
- Does data an operator publishes openly to the public count as 其他经营者合法持有的数据 ("data lawfully held by another business operator")?
What it makes you log
Logging duty
Article 13 prohibits using data, algorithms, technology or platform rules to hinder other operators' network products and prohibits obtaining or using another operator's lawfully held data by fraud, coercion, or evading or destroying technical management measures. It imposes no duty to create, keep, produce or review a log or record. Article 21 of the same Act (a platform operator keeps records of unfair competition it finds among in-platform operators and reports it) and Article 40 (the Act reaches acts abroad that disturb the domestic market) are outside the cited article and are not read into it, so the hook is empty.
- Kind
- None
- As of
What this law does
The third paragraph of the amended Article 13 prohibits a business operator from obtaining or using, by fraud, coercion, or by evading or destroying technical management measures, data lawfully held by another business operator, where doing so harms that operator's lawful rights and interests and disrupts market competition order. It took effect .
It codifies the result courts had already reached under the law's older general clause: Beijing IP Court held in Sina Weibo v. Maimai (Dec.
2016, secondary-sourced) that reusing API data after a partnership ended was unfair competition under a triple-authorization principle, and Shanghai Pudong New Area People's Court held in Hantao (Dianping) v. Baidu (, secondary-sourced) that spidering reviews into a competing product was an unfair substantive substitute for the source's own product.
When LexLint raises it
When your app profile says your app crawls the web or trains models.
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