China proposes export controls on 23 AI technologies, from large models to agents, but not on work already open-sourced

China's Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) and Ministry of Science and Technology published a draft revision of the country's Catalogue of Technologies Prohibited or Restricted from Export on 16 October 2026, proposing to add 40 technologies, 23 of them in artificial intelligence. The draft is open for public comment until 15 November, and a temporary registration requirement for exporting the listed technologies applies from the day of publication.

The source documents are in Chinese. Where we give Chinese text in quotation marks, it is verbatim from MOFCOM; the English renderings beside it are our own translations, not official wording.

What was published

• Announcement 2026 No. 48, issued jointly by the two ministries and dated 16 October 2026 (stamped 16:00 Beijing time, 09:00 BST).
• It is a draft for comment. The announcement says the proposal is being put out for public consultation, and the technology list is labelled "征求意见稿" (draft for comment). Comments run "2026年10月16日-11月15日" (16 October to 15 November 2026) by email, fax or letter.
• Three fields: AI (23 technologies), biomedicine (5) and photovoltaics (12).

We counted the list

We counted Annex 1, the 14-page technology list, ourselves. It has 22 table rows containing 40 numbered technology items:

• AI: 11 rows, 23 items, of which 6 would be prohibited from export and 17 restricted.
• Biomedicine: 5 rows, 5 items (3 prohibited, 2 restricted).
• Photovoltaics: 6 rows, 12 items (5 prohibited, 7 restricted).

That gives 14 prohibited and 26 restricted, which matches the figures in a MOFCOM spokesperson's question-and-answer note published the same day. Several AI items extend categories already in the catalogue.

What the AI entries cover

Proposed for prohibition include AI-driven generation and mutation of malicious code that could be used against critical information infrastructure, defence or core government systems; large models that provide services after training on China's "核心数据" (core data, as defined in other law); and agents designed mainly for those high-sensitivity settings at a high performance level.

Proposed for restriction include:

• Large models: the core technology (the annex lists weights, key checkpoints, underlying source code, architecture design, training optimisation and inference acceleration) of models meeting any one of: training compute of at least 10²⁶ floating-point operations; at least 2 trillion parameters; or "能力达到全球领先水平" (in our translation, capability at a globally leading level), which a note defines as ranking in the global top 10 of public evaluations at the time of export.
• Agents: for example, planning that breaks an instruction into at least 20 executable sub-tasks, or tool use across at least 200 third-party tools, each with accuracy thresholds.
• AI-assisted vulnerability discovery, AI chip and memory-chip design, and techniques for compute clusters, defined in the annex as more than 10,000 AI accelerator cards.

The open-source exclusion, exactly

A note attached to the AI section heading reads: "已通过开源、发表学术论文等方式进入公共领域的技术，不纳入管理范围。" Our translation: technologies that have already entered the public domain through open source, publication of academic papers or similar means are not within the scope of management. The announcement repeats it in its description of the AI field.

Three points on its scope:

• It covers what is already public. A separate note on the restricted AI items says that open-sourcing technologies of this kind, along with Chinese companies building their own compute centres abroad, having chips manufactured abroad, joint research using overseas resources and work on international standards, will get "自动许可等便利措施" (automatic licensing and similar facilitation). On our reading, a future open-source release of a restricted technology is therefore handled through automatic licensing rather than excluded outright.
• The spokesperson describes that route as close to immediate, using the phrase "即报即出" (in our translation, exported as soon as it is reported).
• The spokesperson's note phrases the exclusion as a proposal: such technologies are "拟不纳入出口管理范围" (proposed not to be included in export management).

What the ministry says is not covered

According to the spokesperson's note, products made using the listed technologies are outside the scope. For restricted large models, it says that offering API calls, app or web interaction, SaaS applications or lightweight on-device deployment does not fall under model technology export management. Localised deployment of a restricted AI technology overseas does fall within scope, though deployment on a company's own overseas cloud may qualify for automatic licensing. The note says that once the measures take effect, the great majority of AI technology can still be exported freely.

Registration starts now

From publication until the revised catalogue takes effect, exporters must register on MOFCOM's platform before exporting any listed technology. The announcement says this covers transferring ownership abroad, licensing a domestic technology for use abroad, a change of owner or actual controller to a foreign entity, and other cases MOFCOM specifies by notice. Exports already under way but not yet complete are included.

How the ministry frames it

The spokesperson's note says the catalogue has been revised several times since 2001 and that this revision is routine work that "不针对任何特定国家、地区或实体" (in our translation, does not target any particular country, region or entity). Reuters, in a report carried by The Standard, set the move against competition with the United States over AI.

Why it matters

On our reading, the large-model thresholds are drawn at the frontier: 10²⁶ operations, 2 trillion parameters or a top-10 public ranking, alongside an exclusion for work already released openly and a statement that serving models abroad by API is not covered. What remains open is how a global top-10 ranking would be judged in practice and what the final list looks like after comments close on 15 November.