Tian Wu

Generative AI & Intellectual Property Counsel

Tian Wu advises innovators, technology companies, and content businesses on patent protection, AI-related intellectual property, and creative-industry compliance from Guangzhou's Tianhe District — one of southern China's most dynamic centres of technology and commerce.

As a lawyer at Guangdong Zhihang (Guangzhou) Law Firm, Tian Wu brings a combination that remains rare in Chinese legal practice: a quarter-century of courtroom and advisory experience across the full breadth of civil, commercial, and criminal law, layered since 2023 with a formal qualification as a Chinese Patent Agent. He is equally at home drafting a patent application, responding to an invalidation challenge, or advising a studio on who owns an image produced by a machine. For clients facing the newest questions in intellectual property — the copyright status of AI-generated works, the patentability of algorithms, the ownership of model outputs — his practice offers both doctrinal depth and practical judgment.

Professional Background

Tian Wu has practiced law continuously since 2000, a record of more than twenty-five years in the profession. Over that career he has provided comprehensive legal services to a wide range of clients in family and marriage law, contract and debt disputes, criminal defense, and corporate legal affairs. The breadth is deliberate: business disputes rarely arrive in clean categories, and a client who engages him on a single matter often finds that the same matter touches contract questions, governance issues, and liability exposure that he has handled for years. His experience on the criminal side, in particular, sharpens his instincts for the evidentiary and procedural discipline that regulatory and enforcement matters demand.

In 2023, Tian Wu obtained China's Patent Agent qualification, a credential that permits qualified practitioners to act before the national intellectual property administration in patent prosecution matters. He has also personally obtained a granted national patent — experience that gives him the perspective of an inventor as well as an advocate when advising clients on their own filings. In recognition of his professional record, he has received the Guangzhou Lawyers Outstanding Performance Award. The progression of his career tells a clear story: a general practitioner who built a trusted, broad-based practice, and who then chose to add a rigorous technical discipline to it at a moment when technology and law were converging.

Patent Prosecution & AI Inventions

Tian Wu's patent practice spans the complete life cycle of a patent right: high-quality patent drafting, PCT international applications, invalidation requests and responses, and enforcement litigation. In the era of generative AI, these core skills have acquired new urgency. Under Chinese patent law and examination practice, inventions implemented through software and algorithms are governed by specific rules: the claimed subject matter must be technical, and the solution must address a technical problem through technical means. Drafting that satisfies these requirements — while surviving examination and later invalidation — is a specialist craft.

The questions his drafting work now routinely confronts include how to claim a machine-learning model without disclosing trade secrets, how to structure method, apparatus, and storage-medium claims for AI systems, how to draft around a data-processing pipeline, and how to build a portfolio that remains robust as prior art evolves month by month. For companies whose core asset is an algorithm, he advises on which innovations are genuinely protectable, which are better held as trade secrets, and how a filing strategy should be sequenced around product development and market entry.

• Patent drafting and prosecution for AI, software, and algorithm-based inventions
• PCT international applications and overseas filing strategy
• Patent invalidation requests, responses, and validity opinions
• Patent enforcement litigation and infringement analysis

Generative AI Copyright & Content Protection

Generative AI has unsettled copyright assumptions that stood for a century. Chinese courts, examiners, and commentators are actively working through the questions: whether AI-generated images, text, music, or video qualify for copyright protection; where human intellectual input lies in a prompt-and-iterate workflow; who owns the output when a model is fine-tuned on a client's proprietary corpus; and what happens when the training data itself contains works protected by third parties. These are not abstract puzzles — they determine whether a business can exploit, license, or defend its AI-assisted output at all.

Tian Wu's advice in this area combines patent-law precision with practical commercial judgment. For content businesses — design studios, publishers, media platforms, and software houses — he addresses the licensing of training data, the terms of use of generative tools, ownership clauses in commissioning contracts, and the documentation trail that may later determine whether a work is protectable. For technology companies, he advises on data sourcing and acquisition, on structuring licences for third-party content used in model training, and on the compliance posture that keeps an AI product aligned with China's data and copyright rules.

On the enforcement side, he assists rightsholders in responding to AI-facilitated infringement: unauthorized reproduction of protected works within training sets, AI-generated look-alikes, and the large-scale distribution of machine-made copies. The remedies available under China's copyright framework — including statutory damages and preliminary measures — depend on evidence discipline, and his litigation background informs how he builds a file from the first day of an engagement.

Algorithm & AI Governance Compliance

Beyond intellectual property, bringing AI products to market in China is governed by a fast-moving regulatory framework, including the Interim Measures for the Management of Generative Artificial Intelligence Services and the rules covering algorithm filing, deep synthesis, and recommendation systems. Compliance in this field is continuous and documentation-intensive: obligations attach at design, at launch, and throughout operation.

For clients deploying AI systems, Tian Wu's framework covers the filing and record-keeping duties attached to public-facing generative services, content safety requirements, labelling and disclosure obligations for AI-generated content, and the data governance that underpins all of it — personal information protection, security assessments, and the management of training corpora. His long experience in criminal and regulatory practice is an asset here: he understands what regulators are looking for and what the consequences of non-compliance can be, which keeps his compliance advice concrete rather than theoretical.

Approach to Practice

Tian Wu's Approach to Practice reflects the habits of a patent practitioner: precision, documentation, and patience. He begins by understanding the technology or transaction on its own terms — reading the specification, the model documentation, the contract, the product description — before applying legal rules to it. He then maps the client's options in writing, with clear trade-offs, so that decisions are made with complete information and can be revisited as circumstances change.

• Technology-first preparation: the invention or product is understood before legal analysis begins
• Documented strategies and explicit decision points in every engagement
• Deadline-driven management of filings, responses, and court timelines
• Prosecution, licensing, and enforcement treated as one integrated portfolio

"A patent is a claim about the future — it states what technology the world will need and who should be rewarded for providing it. My job is to write that claim precisely enough to hold, and to defend it honestly."

His professional philosophy is simple and consistent: integrity in every representation, diligence in every task. Over twenty-five years, he has maintained that a lawyer's reputation is built the same way a patent is — claim by claim, with careful work and no shortcuts.

Local Practice in Guangzhou

Based in Tianhe District, Guangzhou's central business district, Tian Wu serves a client base that reflects the Pearl River Delta's manufacturing and innovation economy: technology companies, design houses, manufacturers, trading firms, and content businesses. Guangzhou sits at the heart of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, and it is home to the Guangzhou Intellectual Property Court, one of China's dedicated IP courts, where patent and technical cases are heard by specialist judges. For anyone protecting technology in southern China, this institutional proximity matters.

For international clients, the Greater Bay Area offers a distinctive combination: mainland manufacturing and technology strength, Hong Kong's common-law financial and trading system, and the region's role as a testbed for cross-border commerce. Tian Wu's base in Guangzhou allows him to work across these worlds — advising mainland companies that seek patent protection abroad through the PCT system, and assisting overseas principals who need to understand how intellectual property rights are obtained and enforced in China. His long record of service to a broad client base, and his recognition within the Guangzhou legal community, reflect a practice built on trust in one of China's great commercial cities.