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Published on Oct. 21, 2026

China wants its AI companies to keep winning business abroad while retaining control over the country's most sensitive technology. On October 16, 2026, the Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) and the Ministry of Science and Technology proposed adding 23 selected AI capabilities to the country’s technology export-control catalog, including certain large models, AI agents and computing clusters.

The draft distinguishes between transferring core AI tech and selling access to AI services. "The scope of AI technologies under supervision is precise and limited. Once implemented, most AI technologies can still be exported freely," a Commerce Ministry spokesperson said, reported the official news agency Xinhua (in Chinese).

China's export control catalog is updated from time to time. Only some of the technologies on its list are banned from export, because they are classified as harmful to China's national security or interests. For other items on the list, exporters have to apply for a license before they can export them.

Some AI technologies deemed dangerous for national security would be banned from export, for example those that can generate or modify malicious code capable of attacking critical infrastructure. Defensive cybersecurity technologies such as AI-assisted vulnerability discovery tools are an example of those technologies that would not be banned but “restricted,” and export licenses can be requested for them.

The AI technologies now suggested to be included have been chosen according to the sensitivity of their data. Following the detailed draft annex published by MOFCOM, models offering services after training on China's "core data" would be prohibited. Models trained on "important data" would be restricted, with narrowly defined rules.

A separate control route looks at frontier capabilities. Core technology of models meeting any of three criteria would be included in the catalog: at least 10²⁶ floating-point operations (FLOPS), at least 2 trillion parameters, or globally leading capabilities, defined by top-10 rankings.

Parameters measure model size, not training data volume. The capability of AI technology is also assessed. A smaller model could qualify due to the data used for its training, or if it is deemed to have globally leading qualities.

The targeted assets include model weights, source code, architecture and training methods. New open-weight releases by Chinese developers, which have become one of China's biggest global successes of late, would also need licenses for export if they involve restricted technology. A MOFCOM spokesperson indicated that those licenses are likely to be granted under a “report and export” rule, however.

Open-source AI or academic papers already in the public domain would be excluded. For companies that plan to transfer open-weight models abroad, licensing could be “automatic,” the authorities said. It is unclear how that will work out in reality at this point in time, however.

Moonshot AI and Z.ai are among the Chinese developers entering revenue-sharing agreements to deploy open-weight models on overseas cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services. As they involve transferring model weights, the new requirements could delay them, the South China Morning Post quoted Alex Colville, an analyst specializing in Chinese AI at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, as saying. He also emphasized Beijing’s flexibility in adjusting AI regulation as the technology changes, and also stressed that it is too early to know how Beijing will actually implement the new export rules.

As to why the stricter rules for the export of the 23 AI technologies have been proposed, MOFCOM wrote in a statement that it is "a routine part of technology trade management" and “does not target any specific country, region or entity.” It aims to "mitigate the risks of technologies falling out of control or proliferating inappropriately while ensuring normal international technology exchanges and cooperation," it said.

Some analysts see a connection between the new export controls and the ill-fated attempt of Mark Zuckerberg's Meta to acquire the Chinese AI agent developer Manus. Its parent company, Butterfly Effect, had moved from mainland China to Singapore before Meta’s US$2 billion acquisition. That apparently did not go down well with the Chinese government, which halted the transaction on national-security grounds. Manus announced in September that it has resumed independent operations.

While the temporary registration requirements introduced on October 16 give Beijing earlier visibility when covered technology transfers involve overseas owners or controllers, the long list of technologies proposed for addition to the export catalog, including those from the fields of biomedicine and solar tech, makes it unlikely that the Meta-Manus deal had such a prominent influence on Beijing's policy revision. It may have played some role, but the real reasons lie elsewhere.

Mastering core technologies is a long-standing key demand of the Chinese president Xi Jinping. “One reason China fell behind and suffered attacks in modern history was its backwardness in science and technology,” he said in a speech to China’s academies of sciences and engineering in 2014. That predates the first Trump administration by three years and most of the current U.S. export controls.

Before him, Deng Xiaoping, the architect of China's policy of reform and opening to the outside world, had explicitly linked scientific modernization and stronger defense to security against foreign aggression. That was in 1978.
Yet the Chinese quest for technological independence reaches even further back. In 1793, Qing emperor Qianlong rejected Lord Macartney’s requests for wider British trade and diplomatic access. “Our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its borders,” Qianlong said according to historical records.

Later, a relatively isolated China was outmaneuvered and outgunned by British steamboats during the First Opium War of 1839–1842, followed by the cession of Hong Kong Island and a lot of other painful experiences which are fresh in the Chinese public consciousness to this day.

As historian Julian Gewirtz wrote about China in 2019, “pursuing an ultimate state of self-reliance has relied above all on foreign technology and expertise.” Nowadays, changing this statement to "foreign and Chinese technologies and expertise" would make it more accurate.

Moving forward, a lot will depend on how Beijing is enforcing the new export controls once they come into effect. Judging by official statements and China's by now established pattern of using technology as “an instrument for achieving national rejuvenation,” as the Swedish policy analyst Anton Irekvist Rehn wrote in a recent essay, it would be a misinterpretation to view China's new export controls for AI solely through the lens of the rivalry with the U.S.

Foreign companies need to know the regulations and fill out all the forms to be compliant. There is, however, no need to panic. China wants to control its core engineering technologies. It also wants to stay open for business.