On November 4, the 2026 World Internet Conference Wuzhen Summit opened with its first sub-forum, devoted to mutual trust, interconnection and interoperability among AI agents. Co-hosted by the Cyberspace Administration of China and the GSMA, the session unveiled four deliverables at once. Two of them were the Agent Development Self-Discipline Pact and an agent identity registration and resolution platform.

The pact was jointly launched by 20 organizations, with the list noting that the order implies no ranking. First on it is the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, joined by Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, Huawei, Xiaomi, Volcano Engine and Ant Group, among others. The eight self-discipline measures run neatly from strengthening trust systems through to promoting inclusive access to technology. That neatness is precisely the tell: none of the eight is new.

Only the Second of the Eight Measures Carries a Technical Checklist

The second measure lists six items: agent registration and resolution, capability description and discovery, intent understanding and translation, network routing and connection, resource scheduling and metering, and protocol compatibility and mutual recognition. These map almost line for line onto a national standard that took effect six months ago.

Records on the National Public Service Platform for Standards Information show that the seven-part Artificial Intelligence - Agent Interconnection series, numbered GB/Z 185.1 through 185.7, all carry a publication date of May 22, 2026. The documents cover architecture, identity codes, identity management, description, discovery, interaction and tool invocation. The China Electronics Standardization Institute led the drafting under guidance from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the organizers say more than 70 companies took part.

Between May 22 and November 4, the standard ran more than five months ahead of the pact. The standard settles how things should be written down. The pact addresses whether anyone is willing to follow what was written.

Three dates for this have circulated in the press: May, June 26, and July. The standards database records May 22, and that is the date used here.

Less often mentioned is the category. The Z in GB/Z designates a guiding technical document, neither a mandatory standard nor a recommended one (GB/T). The database's category column reads simply "guidance." The seven documents hand the industry a shared language. They hand no one an obligation.

The Platform Has Launched. The Operating Platform Is Still Under Construction

The other deliverable is the agent identity registration and resolution platform, built to handle three things: identity coding, cross-domain resolution and trusted interconnection. On top of it would sit an operating platform to carry onboarding and capability publishing.

The platform was "released." The operating platform is "under construction." Pilot validation sits inside the Smart Connected Pujiang action plan, and the first publicly named services to connect are Alipay's government AI assistant Xiaozheng and Sesame Credit. Ant Group Vice President Chen Liang said Ant's agent collaboration infrastructure is already connected, and that the company is co-developing the ASL protocol with more than 20 partners.

A national identity layer, and the first names on the board are two businesses from the same company. Pilot validation naturally starts with whoever is willing to cooperate, but how narrow that sample is says a lot about the distance still left to "trusted cross-platform connection."

Not One Pure-Play Model Company Among the 20 Founding Organizations

No startup whose core business is foundation models appears on the list. Moonshot AI, Zhipu, MiniMax and StepFun are all absent, and those happen to be among the most active builders of consumer-facing agents in China.

Why each stayed out is not addressed in any public statement. But it points to a problem: the hard part of agent interoperability is precisely the cross-vendor case. No pact is needed for a company's own model to call its own tools. A pact is needed when Company A's agent calls Company B's service. If the absent parties are the ones being called, the scenarios the standard can actually cover shrink.