China enlists AI to sniff out corruption in public bidding

BEIJING, China – China wants to use artificial intelligence in public tendering and bidding to guard against backroom deals and corruption, according to guidelines released on Tuesday, February 10, just as President Xi Jinping’s years-long corruption purge intensifies.

AI-enhanced tools should be used to flag irregularities in tender and bidding documents, supervise review committees’ decisions, and have “human-like” reasoning ability to generate recommendations, China’s National Development and Reform Commission and seven other agencies said.

The systems should “dig for clues to suspected bid-rigging and provide a reference for relevant authorities enforcing discipline and laws,” they said.

The guidelines followed Xi’s call in January 2025 to enrich the country’s anti-graft toolbox at a meeting of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the country’s top corruption watchdog. The commission also stressed “the use of big data to empower the fight against corruption and misconduct.”

AI has already made some progress.

An anti-graft watchdog in the province of Zhejiang detained a state-owned asset administrator in January 2025 after AI flagged potential misconduct in several public projects’ tendering processes, state broadcaster CCTV said in a documentary series highlighting corrupt officials last month.

The administrator, Feng Jiang, was found to have accepted hundreds of thousands of yuan in bribes from bidders to act as a middleman to pay off members of tender review committees, CCTV said.

“There are too many tenders and bids, and it is impossible for us to look at every project,” Wang Rongfei, a local anti-graft agency staffer, was quoted by the broadcaster as saying.

“The strength of big data is that it can provide us with useful leads, and, once we have a lead, we can follow it step by step and unravel the case bit by bit,” he added.

Feng was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison by a court in November, CCTV said. – Rappler.com