Picture a scene that is not far off: you ask Company A's assistant to book a meeting room in Company B's building. The assistant politely says it cannot, because it does not know the other company's system or who to ask.
This is not a matter of capability but of interfaces. Each assistant lives in its own courtyard, with no street number for the other and no shared language. The industry calls this cross-domain discovery and connection. In plain terms, can the two find each other at all?
On November 4, at a side forum of the Wuzhen summit, 20 organisations jointly released the Self-Discipline Convention on the Development of AI Agents. The document is meant to solve exactly the problem of that unbookable meeting room.
The Meeting Room Nobody Can Book
Your phone may already hold three or four assistants. One writes copy, one looks things up, one books tickets. Each is competent on its own; together they are like three people who cannot understand each other's dialect.
A concrete example: ask an assistant to compile last month's expense claims into a table, then send the table to finance. That crosses three systems, three sets of logins, and a format that has to line up. People find it tedious; machines find it worse.
The trouble is not compute. It is agreement. Who speaks first, in what format, whether the other side recognises this identity, and who is responsible when something goes wrong. Without those agreements, capability alone leaves everyone working alone.
Eight Articles on Paper
The convention has eight articles. The first covers trust: a layered, verifiable identity for agents, plus rules on how permissions are granted and how rules are embedded. In translation, first prove that you are you.
The second covers the infrastructure for interconnection. The text lists a run of technologies: registration and resolution, capability description and discovery, intent understanding and conversion, network routing and connection, resource scheduling and metering. None can be skipped.
Translated again: give every agent a household registration, compile a directory, then agree on how to greet, how to translate, and how to keep the books. The order cannot be shuffled; shuffle it and nothing connects.
The remaining articles run through interoperability, security, governance, user rights, enabling every industry, and shared access to the technology. The eight cover a single chain from identity to responsibility, with no gap in between.
The fourth deals with security in fairly heavy terms: runtime monitoring, behaviour control, abnormal circuit-breaking. Circuit-breaking is an electrician's word. It means throw the switch the moment the current looks wrong, rather than wait for the wiring to catch fire.
The sixth covers user rights: the right to know, the right to choose, and the final say over matters that matter. This one speaks directly to ordinary people. Before a robot decides for you, you should be told.
The seventh is closest to business: build low-threshold tools for development and deployment, embed agents into existing production systems and workflows, and bring down the cost of putting them to work. That sentence is written for smaller companies.
Who Signed
The organiser is the China Network Social Organization Federation. There are 20 founding members. The China Academy of Information and Communications Technology comes first, followed by Tencent, Ant, Alibaba, Volcano Engine, Huawei, Honor, OPPO and Xiaomi, eight familiar names.
The rest include Baidu, AsiaInfo, China Mobile Internet, Sangfor, Qi Anxin, 360, Du Xiaoman, as well as the National Blockchain Technology Innovation Centre and the Shanghai Digital Certificate Authority, spanning telecoms, cloud, devices and security.
The list covers most of the domestic players building agents: model makers, cloud providers, phone makers, security firms and identity certifiers. Remove any one category and the chain fails to close.
The combination itself says one thing: interconnection cannot be done by a single company. However clever your assistant is, if the other side will not connect, you still cannot book that meeting room. So everyone has to sit at the same table first.
That is also why the list includes both model makers and security firms. An agent that operates software for people must first be trustworthy, not merely clever. No bank will let a program with an unclear identity move money.
How Much Weight Self-Discipline Carries
Look closely at the two characters in the name: self-discipline. This is not a new regulation, not a mandatory standard, not a ministry rule. Once signed, compliance rests on the signatories themselves, plus industry bodies and public scrutiny. There are no penalties.
The text also says the convention will be assessed periodically and revised as needed. That is standard wording for an industry document: it leaves an opening and leaves room. When real disagreements arise, the matter still goes back to law and regulators.
It implements the task of strengthening industry self-discipline set out in the Implementation Opinions on the Standardised Application and Innovative Development of AI Agents. In other words, it is an act of industry self-organisation inside a policy framework, not something that grew out of nowhere.
So do not expect it to make two companies' assistants interoperate tomorrow. What it can do is align technical definitions first: how identity is marked, how capability is described, how responsibility is divided. These are the foundations nobody sees.
Such work moves slowly, but once aligned, later entrants save effort. If everyone writes their own version, connecting ten partners means writing ten adapters, and the cost lands on every user.
A Market of Twenty-odd Billion
On the same day, another report released in Wuzhen put a price on the sector. The China Internet Development Report says the market for enterprise-grade AI agents in China reached 21.2 billion yuan in 2025.
That figure has to be read with its qualifiers: enterprise-grade, the year 2025, and the agent segment alone, not the whole AI industry. At that scale it is neither large nor small, just enough to support a track.
The pie is not big, but the moves are. Twenty organisations signing together suggests they all judge that this has to be done sooner or later. Rather than be pushed along by standards, they would rather sit at the table first and mark the pitfalls.
For ordinary people, the convention's effect will arrive late and in a way they never notice: one day you ask an assistant to handle something across companies, and instead of saying it cannot, it asks whether you want it done now.
Until that day, the document is closer to a residents' charter in an apartment block. It cannot override the law, but it lets people in the same building agree on a few shared rules first, such as when to take out the rubbish and whether smoking is allowed in the lift.
The weight of a convention is often only clear in hindsight. There was little heat on signing day, but if cross-company agents really can do business with each other years from now, the starting point will probably be buried in documents like this, in those eight articles.
Disclaimer: This article is based on publicly available information and is for reference only. It does not constitute investment advice.