CHANG TSI
Insights
China’s 2026 Government Work Report, together with the latest annual reports of the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) and the Supreme People’s Procuratorate (SPP), offers a useful lens into where intellectual property protection in China is headed.
Taken together, the three reports point in the same direction: as China places greater strategic emphasis on future industries, the smart economy, artificial intelligence, and data-driven growth, IP protection is also moving into a broader set of business and regulatory scenarios.
For multinational companies, in-house legal teams, and international counsel, several developments merit close attention.
The 2026 Government Work Report places notable emphasis on emerging industries and industries of the future, including integrated circuits, aerospace, biomedicine, the low-altitude economy, quantum technology, embodied AI, brain-computer interfaces, and 6G.
From an IP perspective, this matters because it suggests that legal protection is increasingly being treated as part of the institutional framework supporting industrial development and technological innovation. In practical terms, IP strategy is becoming more closely linked to the timing of R&D, commercialization, and competitive positioning.
The annual reports of China’s top court and top prosecutor indicate that judicial and prosecutorial authorities are now dealing with a broader and more complex mix of disputes than traditional patent, trademark, and copyright cases alone.
The focus increasingly extends to areas such as:
This development is significant because it reflects a closer connection between legal protection and the business contexts in which innovation is created, used, and contested.
One of the clearest themes in the reports is the stronger emphasis on trade secret protection, particularly for technology-intensive businesses.
The cases discussed in the article include substantial punitive damages, criminal convictions, and alleged cross-border leakage of confidential information. Taken together, these developments suggest that trade secret protection is being treated with greater intensity across civil, criminal, and administrative channels.
For companies, the practical implication is straightforward: trade secret protection is no longer only a matter of responding to disputes after they arise. It increasingly turns on whether a business can demonstrate concrete and ongoing internal controls, including identification of confidential information, access restrictions, logging, employee departure procedures, and disclosure management.
The reports, along with related judicial commentary, suggest that AI-related adjudication in China is becoming more operational and fact-specific.
Issues such as the use of training data, risks associated with model outputs, service provider responsibility, review and correction mechanisms, and the scope of reasonable duty of care are beginning to move beyond broad policy discussion and into more concrete legal assessment.
For businesses developing or deploying generative AI tools, this means compliance is less likely to be treated as a stand-alone exercise after launch. Instead, it is becoming increasingly relevant to product design, deployment, internal governance, and evidentiary preparedness from the outset.
Another notable theme is the growing importance of data-related disputes.
The article points to rising case volume in areas such as data ownership, data transactions, personal information protection, and algorithm-related issues. It also notes that civil data disputes are increasingly being handled within courts’ IP adjudication structures.
This is an important signal. It suggests that data disputes are being viewed less as purely contractual or general tort matters and more as part of a broader framework of innovation protection, competition order, and rights allocation.
For companies, this raises a number of practical questions, including how to protect lawfully generated data assets, how to ensure that data collection, processing, training, and output activities remain within legal boundaries, and how to align data governance with privacy, data security, and platform-related requirements.
The broader message is that IP protection in China is becoming more deeply embedded in business operations.
For companies operating in China, at least four practical priorities stand out.
First, adopt a coordinated protection strategy across different asset types. Patents, trademarks, copyright, trade secrets, and data-related interests should be considered together rather than managed in isolation.
Second, move IP management closer to the front end of business activity. R&D, brand use, content review, confidentiality controls, employee movement, and internal approval processes all affect the strength and defensibility of a company’s rights position.
Third, address rights allocation early in collaborative arrangements. In joint development, licensing, data sharing, and commercialization structures, ownership, scope of use, confidentiality, liability, and dispute resolution should be addressed at the outset.
Fourth, treat AI and data compliance as part of operational infrastructure. Training data, model controls, content use, personal information handling, data security, and authorization for digital assets should be built into workflows rather than left for later remediation.
The key point is not simply that China is strengthening IP protection. More importantly, IP protection is becoming increasingly intertwined with industrial policy, judicial practice, technological development, and day-to-day business governance.
For companies, that makes early planning more important than ever. In the current environment, competitive advantage may depend not only on innovation itself, but also on whether innovation can be translated into clear rights, defensible structures, and sustainable operational discipline.
