China Drafts Export Controls on 23 AI Technologies Including Model Weights; Already-Public Open Source Is Excluded
China's commerce and science ministries published a draft on Oct. 16 adding 23 AI technologies — large models, agents, computing clusters and information processing — to the catalogue of technologies banned or restricted from export. Technology already public through open source or papers is excluded. Threshold details such as 2 trillion parameters come from Bloomberg via The Straits Times; we did not read the annex.
Beijing is proposing a licensing lever over unpublished frontier weights, offshore deployments and foreign takeovers of Chinese AI firms — not a ban on already-public open weights. China's Ministry of Commerce and Ministry of Science and Technology on Friday, October 16 published Announcement 2026 No. 48, a draft revision of the Catalogue of Technologies Prohibited or Restricted from Export.
What the MOFCOM text says
The draft adds 40 technologies across AI, biomedicine and photovoltaics. The AI section covers 23 items spanning large models, agents, computing clusters and information processing. "Technology that has already entered the public domain through open source or published academic papers is not brought within the scope of the management," the announcement says, in our translation. Public comments run from October 16 to November 15.
From the publication date, a temporary pre-export registration applies until the catalogue is formally revised. Covered transfers include transferring ownership abroad, licensing technology for use abroad, and changing the owner or controller of a domestic technology to a foreign entity.
Thresholds as Bloomberg reads them
The Straits Times republished a Bloomberg story saying restricted items would include model weights and source code above set performance thresholds: models with at least 2 trillion parameters trained on "important data" (Bloomberg names Moonshot's Kimi K3 and Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Max) or ranked in the global top 10, and AI chip design at 14nm or below or with 2.5D/3D packaging. Overseas deployment of a covered model would count as an export, with automatic licensing when it runs on the Chinese provider's own overseas infrastructure; foreign users' access through apps, websites or APIs would not be controlled, Bloomberg reported.
The Decoder's reading
The Decoder headlined that China plans to tighten export controls "on open-weight models" and 23 AI technologies. That framing overstates the draft we read: the MOFCOM text excludes technology already public through open source or papers, and The Decoder's own body also says already-public technology is exempt and that publishing restricted weights as open source can qualify for automatic licensing. We attribute the "on open-weight models" reading to The Decoder's headline, not to the draft.
Limits
- This is a consultation draft. Threshold figures (2 trillion parameters, top-10, 14nm, overseas-deployment and API carve-outs) come from Bloomberg via The Straits Times. We did not read the annex that lists the specific technology ranges.
- FLOPs and accelerator counts circulating online were not verified in any source we opened and are omitted.