Submission Statement: China has proposed new export controls on technologies used in areas including AI models and agents and chip design. The draft controls issued on Friday highlight Beijing’s growing focus on maintaining the security of rapidly developing domestic AI technologies amid intensifying rivalry with the US.
The export of leading AI models trained on sensitive Chinese data, as well as advanced AI agents used in areas such as critical digital infrastructure, defence and government services, would be restricted under the draft rules released jointly by the ministries of commerce and information technology.
The draft controls issued on Friday also cover technologies used to design advanced processing and memory chips, packaging and networking equipment.
Open-weight AI models — which can be run and customised by users — would be exempt if they were made publicly available and had not been trained on sensitive data. However, the rules would allow restriction on the transfer of technology used in such open-weight models — potentially blocking the transfer offshore of ownership or key employees — if they surpassed 2tn parameters or were ranked top among global peers by performance.
Chinese AI start-up Moonshot’s latest K3 model, which caused a global stir this year as its performance approached top-tier offerings from Anthropic, has 2.8tn parameters.
Simpler approval procedures would also apply to Chinese companies building and operating AI data centres overseas, manufacturing their own chip designs abroad, conducting research with foreign partners or helping set international standards.
China’s most recent revision to its export restriction list in 2025 added several lithium-ion battery manufacturing technologies to it, building on existing controls on strategically important sectors such as rare earth extraction and processing.
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