China's State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) has published the country's first national standard dedicated to AI agent connectivity, titled "Artificial Intelligence Agent Interconnection." The standard, reported in late June and formally covered by state media in early July, breaks the framework into seven sub-standards spanning overall architecture, identity-code establishment, identity management, agent description, agent discovery, agent interaction, and agent tool calling.

What the standard covers

The goal is a "closed-loop system" in which any AI agent, regardless of which company or framework built it, can be uniquely identified, discovered by other agents and systems, and safely invoked to perform tasks. The identity-code and identity-management sub-standards effectively give each agent a verifiable digital ID, while the discovery and interaction sub-standards define how agents advertise their capabilities and hand off tasks to one another. The tool-calling sub-standard sets common rules for how an agent invokes external software, data sources or other agents to complete a job — the same interoperability problem that protocols like Anthropic's Model Context Protocol and Google's Agent2Agent protocol were built to solve in Western markets.

Why Beijing is moving now

Chinese regulators have watched enterprise adoption of AI agents accelerate through 2026, with agents increasingly linked into internal systems, payment rails and other agents across company boundaries. Without a shared identity and interaction layer, SAMR argues, that expansion multiplies both integration costs and security risk, since organizations have no standard way to verify what an unfamiliar agent is or vet what it is authorized to do before granting it access. A unified national standard lets enterprises build against a single spec rather than negotiating compatibility deal by deal, which Chinese officials say should lower development costs and shorten the time it takes to bring new agent-based products to market.

Where it fits globally

The move puts China ahead of most Western jurisdictions in codifying agent interoperability into binding national standards rather than leaving it to industry consortia and voluntary protocols. It follows a broader pattern of Chinese standards bodies moving quickly to formalize rules for fast-growing AI categories, and comes as SAMR and other agencies have separately tightened rules on companion-style conversational AI. For international AI agent vendors operating or partnering in China, the interconnection standard is likely to become a de facto requirement for agent products that need to interact with domestic platforms, payment systems or other locally built agents.