AI Platforms to Restrict Exam Assistance Features During Gaokao

As the annual national college entrance exam, or gaokao, draws near, online discussions over whether AI tools will be prohibited during the exam period have gone viral on Chinese social media, triggering widespread public concern.

In response to these rumors, Red Star News reached out to several major AI service providers on May 26 to verify the status of their platforms.

Doubao, an AI assistant developed by ByteDance, confirmed that while the platform will remain accessible during the gaokao, certain functions will be disabled. "Features such as photo-based problem-solving will be suspended," a Doubao customer service representative said, adding that exact changes would be subject to on-page notifications, as official notices have not yet been received.

A staff member at Tencent noted that during last year's gaokao, the company's Yuanbao AI explicitly refrained from answering exam-related questions. The policy is expected to continue this year.

Baidu, the operator of the Wenxin large language model, stated that its business division had not yet received any directives to restrict services during the exam period, though no further commitment was made.

Similarly, a representative from iFlytek said that while no concrete instructions have been issued, it is likely that all major language models will implement some form of limitation.

According to a report by Xiaoxiang Morning News on June 9, 2025, users had noticed that Tencent's Yuanbao became unusable for certain tasks during last year's gaokao. The model reportedly returned a standardized response when asked to analyze or summarize images. Other popular AI tools, including Kimi, Deepseek, and Doubao, also enacted similar restrictions last year.

Coverage by Southern Metropolis Daily in June 2025 provided further details. During exam hours, Alibaba's Tongyi App displayed a notice that its photo-based problem-solving service was temporarily closed, though the app remained capable of recognizing non-exam-related images. The Quark App similarly disabled its Q&A service during exam hours while retaining general image recognition. Doubao's app could identify ordinary landscape photos but rejected any upload of exam-related questions with a message citing non-compliance. Kimi, meanwhile, responded to any image upload with a uniform statement that the feature was unavailable during the exam period to ensure the fairness of the National College Entrance Examination.

This year's gaokao will take place from July 7 to 9.