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
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In force 11 months, effective 15 October 2025.
An unfair competition rule binding private bodies.
As of 29 August 2026.
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 October 15, 2025, and no case has yet applied it.
What this law does
Drafted with AI from the cited sources under the direction of UnGovr staff. UnGovr holds editorial responsibility for this page.
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. This is China's first purpose-built statutory scraping clause and took effect October 15, 2025, with no reported case applying it yet.
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 (26 May 2016, secondary-sourced) that spidering reviews into a competing product was an unfair substantive substitute for the source's own product.
When LexLint raises it
crawls_webtrains_models
Read the law
official text, China National Intellectual Property Administration (cnipa.gov.cn)
Every line above is drawn from the primary source linked here, read on the date shown. This is a research summary, not legal advice.