AI Policy & Regulation

Spain’s Dirección General de Tráfico issued the country’s first operating licence for a Level 4 autonomous passenger vehicle on 10 September, and it went jointly to three companies: WeRide, Uber, and AVOMO, the self-driving unit of the Spanish rental group Moove Cars, with the Madrid city government supporting the application. The permit was granted under Spain’s ES-AV framework and clears the three of them to put vehicles on public roads, with commercial service to the public expected before the end of 2026 once the operating and regulatory conditions are met. Madrid is the fourth city in a WeRide and Uber plan the two say will reach 15 cities and tens of thousands of vehicles before 2030, and WeRide says it is now the only company whose products hold autonomous-driving permits in nine countries, naming China, Spain, Switzerland, Belgium, France, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and the United States. The same morning Pony.ai and the mobility operator Verne said they had begun fully driverless robotaxi passenger testing on public roads in Zagreb, which they call the first anywhere in Europe. Set against both, Anfia chairman Roberto Vavassori asked the EU for an 80 percent tariff on Chinese vehicles and parts above a quota of 8 percent of annual new-car registrations, per Reuters, on top of the combined 18 to 45 percent the 2024 measure already charges Chinese electric vehicles. The proposal covers vehicles and parts and says nothing about software, fleet operations or a permit: a tariff is charged on an object crossing a border, and an operating licence is granted for a service performed inside one. In both deals that day the Chinese company supplied the driving stack while a European operator supplied the cars, the depot, the insurance and the relationship with the regulator, which is a template that travels without a vehicle being imported. Nine permits is nine permissions and no commercial service, Madrid is an expectation for later this year, and Zagreb is a test with passengers in it.

MIIT issued its five-year plan for the information and communications industry on 7 September, thirteen headline indicators across twenty-six tasks and six areas, and set intelligent computing capacity at 9,800 EFLOPS by the end of 2030. The base it grows from is 2,185 EFLOPS at the end of June 2026, measured at FP16 and up 177 percent year on year, so moving to 9,800 over four and a half years works out at roughly 40 percent a year compounded against a trailing twelve months that ran at 177. The plan asks for the orderly deployment of ten-thousand-card and hundred-thousand-card clusters, and MIIT put occupancy across national computing facilities at 71.4 percent at the same July briefing, so close to three in ten of the capacity already built is not in service. Three of the thirteen indicators are efficiency or carbon measures, including the power usage effectiveness of newly built large and hyperscale facilities. The money side puts cumulative information infrastructure investment at 3.8 trillion yuan across 2026 to 2030 and industry revenue at 4.1 trillion by 2030; at the onshore rate of 6.7105 yuan to the dollar on 8 September that investment figure is about 566 billion dollars, where English coverage rendered it as 532 billion, implying a rate near 7.14 that nothing traded at in that week. Chinese banks spent August building collateral for it: Agricultural Bank put a Token loan scheme into Shanghai and Zhejiang, Bank of Chengdu ran a pure credit product capped at 5 million yuan per borrower and backed by compute vouchers, and Zhangjiagang Rural Commercial Bank set aside a 2 billion yuan facility, underwritten on token consumption, compute service contract value and receivables from compute work.

The Cyberspace Administration published a phase-two note on its Qinglang campaign against chaos in AI applications on 2 September, and it places obligations at three points in the pipeline rather than one. Platforms including Douyin, Weibo, Tencent and Xiaohongshu are named for expanding face, voiceprint and violation sample libraries, with 46 governance announcements published between them. Four model products, Doubao, Yuanbao, Qwen and ERNIE, are told to guard the content review pass on original training corpora and to label AI-generated synthetic content so as to prevent illegal information at source, which is an obligation on the pre-training set rather than on a feed. The third layer is distribution: Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO and vivo are named as setting developer admission standards for AI applications and spot re-testing apps already listed, so four handset makers become the admission gate. The note landed one year and one day after the labelling Measures took effect on 1 September 2025. No published standard, audit or methodology sits behind the corpus clause, so what changed this week is scope rather than enforcement capability.

China’s L3 autonomous-driving standard becomes a condition of sale. GB 44721-2026, issued by the State Administration for Market Regulation and the Standardization Administration on 30 July 2026 and effective 1 July 2027, drops the T from the recommended GB/T 44721-2024 and so turns mandatory, enforced through type approval: after that date a passenger or goods vehicle whose L3 or L4 system falls short of it does not get sold in China. The L3 clauses reach past the vehicle to the person in it, requiring seatbelt monitoring, occupancy monitoring and monitoring of the driver’s capacity to take the wheel back, which makes interior sensing a compliance item rather than a feature. Huawei’s Luxeed brand said the RX has already entered L3 type-approval testing, ten months before the rule binds, and Horizon Robotics put its share of basic ADAS on domestic-brand passenger cars at 50.02 percent in the first half, its first time above half, on 2.055 billion yuan of customer contract revenue.

The Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission published a 2026 to 2030 action plan for cyber-information enterprises on 21 August: seven actions and twenty-one measures. Measure 1 orders a continuously updated national database of these firms, with classification and grading standards sorting them into three named tiers. Measure 19 tells regulators to speed up domestic listing review and to open non-IPO exits through S-funds and M&A funds, and tells banks to treat patents, trademarks and data as credit-assessment inputs. Measure 16 orders administrative inspections regulated so as to minimise disruption to normal operations, and Measure 5 names high-end AI chips, high-performance training clusters, world models, agents and embodied intelligence.

Forty-eight central state-owned enterprises appeared together at the World Robot Conference in Beijing on 19 August, showing twelve application scenarios under a joint MIIT and SASAC notice that orders each central enterprise to open at least ten real work stations and each designated province at least twenty, targeting more than a hundred high-value scenarios by the end of 2026. The next morning on the same stage Unitree founder Wang Xingxing said robots are not yet efficient or general enough to be rolled out into factories at scale, and put embodied AI’s ChatGPT moment two to three years away at best. His stock fell 16.05 percent that day.

On 28 July 2026 the FCC added foreign-produced advanced robotic devices to its Covered List, barring new Chinese humanoid and four-legged robots from the US market before they had arrived, with power inverters swept in on the same national-security argument. Beijing called it protectionism and, per the Financial Times, weighed export controls on its own AI models, training data and chip technology.

US Commerce ordered a leading AI lab to cut its two most capable models off from all foreign nationals worldwide, then reversed it a week later. Export controls reached model access, and retreated.

China’s NDRC blocked Meta’s roughly 2 billion dollar acquisition of an agent startup that had reincorporated in Singapore, ordering the deal unwound. State media called it "Singapore-washing."

China’s Cyberspace Administration barred major domestic firms from buying Nvidia AI chips, citing an assessment that domestic parts now match them. The control now cuts both ways.

An interagency committee cleared CXMT for the US Entity List, but Commerce has not updated it since October 2025, the longest pause in a decade, because the two sides are mid-negotiation.

China’s delivery robots crossed the cost line: Neolix says its per-vehicle cost fell more than half in two years to below 10,000 dollars, moving a parcel 25 to 35 percent cheaper than a human courier. The logistics industry projects 860,000 units a year by 2030, and the startup AIROBO closed the field’s largest first round the same week a Shenzhen circuit-board and chip-design platform, JLC, opened more than 170 percent above its offer price.

The US House Select Committee documented the workarounds, legal procurement, smuggling and distillation, and noted China remains the largest market for chipmaking equipment despite the controls.