Law note · China
Anti-Unfair Competition Law, 2025 revision, Article 13 (data scraping and technical circumvention clause)
What it asks of an app
- 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.
When LexLint raises it
crawls_webtrains_models
What we found
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.