The First Case on AI Agents: What Was Adjudicated?
"The First 'Agent' Ruling: What Was Decided?"
On April 30, the Guangzhou Internet Court issued a ruling—China's first behavior preservation order in the intelligent agent (AI agent) field. The defendant, an open-source AI agent software, was ordered to stop downloads, cease actions that bypassed a platform's technical protection measures, and delete related tutorials and data. The core issue: the software used the operating system's "accessibility service" permissions to automate user interactions within other apps without those platforms' authorization.
This mirrors a recent US case where Amazon sued Perplexity for similar reasons—bypassing Amazon's API to directly scrape and interact with its pages—and won a preliminary injunction. Both rulings establish a crucial legal boundary for the AI agent era: agents cannot operate unchecked.
The article argues the fundamental legal principle emerging is one of **dual authorization**. An AI agent requires both **user consent** AND **platform consent** to operate legitimately within that platform's ecosystem. Bypassing platform rules through system-level permissions, even with user permission, undermines platform responsibilities for content moderation, data security, and user privacy, creating liability issues.
The piece uses the evolution of "Doubao Phone" (an AI-integrated smartphone) as a case study. Its initial, aggressive version that bypassed platform controls faced roadblocks. Its upcoming 2.0 version is reportedly pivoting to negotiate API access and authorization deals with major platforms (like Alibaba's ecosystem), seen as a strategic adaptation to the new regulatory reality.
A global trend is identified: the era of unregulated, "wild west" growth for AI agents is ending, replaced by a **compliance race**. This raises barriers to entry, as securing platform authorizations becomes a new cost. Open-source status is also not a legal shield if the code facilitates bypassing technical protections.
In conclusion, these first rulings target not the largest, but the most **aggressive and representative** cases. By setting precedent with them, regulators are efficiently steering the entire industry towards a new, more regulated operating paradigm defined by dual authorization and platform cooperation.
marsbit06/08 10:31
