On April 20, 24 organizations from the national artificial intelligence industry chain, along with experts, scholars, and administrative officials, gathered at the Guangdong High People’s Court to hold an initiative and seminar focused on judicial needs related to intellectual property protection in the open-source AI field. At the meeting, the 24 organizations jointly released the nation’s first Consensus on Strengthening Collaborative Innovation and Promoting the Prosperity of the AI Open-Source Ecosystem (hereinafter referred to as the Consensus).
Currently, AI, as an engine of technological revolution, is profoundly reshaping the global competitive landscape. In 2025, the core industry scale of AI in Guangdong reached 300 billion yuan, accounting for about one-quarter of the national total. Open source has become a key model driving the accelerated iteration of AI technology and its widespread application. However, legal issues such as intellectual property ownership, disputes over compliance with license agreements, and the construction of market competition order are increasingly prominent, becoming focal points of industry concern. The release of this Consensus is a direct response to the needs at the forefront of the industry.
The Consensus aims to leverage open-source communities to promote the co-construction and sharing of resources such as code, models, data, and tools, so that technological benefits can reach more industries and ordinary people. At the same time, the Consensus emphasizes full respect for the legitimate rights and interests of all parties, including developers, contributors, integrators, and open-source community operators, encouraging the construction of a virtuous cycle of “open-source contribution—value-added services—feedback innovation.”
Addressing the key and difficult issues of concern to the industry, the Consensus directly confronts the most challenging legal problems in the current open-source field. All parties clearly recognize the legal validity of open-source licenses and commit to standardizing behaviors such as use, modification, derivative development, and commercial application within the license framework. The Consensus also calls on the industry to jointly resist acts that damage the ecosystem, such as plagiarism, tampering, and theft of achievements, with special emphasis on protecting the legitimate rights and interests of basic large-model open-source parties and respecting their substantial investments in computing power, data, research and development, and maintenance.
To ensure the implementation of the Consensus, all parties have defined practical and feasible action plans for co-construction and co-governance. On one hand, industry associations and open-source communities are encouraged to explore the development of compatibility guidelines or standards for different open-source licenses, and to promote the establishment of sound internal compliance review and assessment mechanisms by enterprises to prevent potential legal risks in advance. On the other hand, the Consensus actively explores the acceleration of building a “fast track” for dispute resolution, achieving front-end prevention and efficient resolution of issues such as license breaches, intellectual property infringement, and ownership disputes. Additionally, all parties will establish a regular communication mechanism involving “government, industry, academia, research, and judiciary” to jointly study new legal issues arising from technological iterations.
