China Drafts Export Curbs on AI It Already Shared

China on Oct. 16 proposed adding 40 AI, solar and biomedicine technologies to its export catalog and began registering those transfers the same day. The Ministry of Commerce and the Ministry of Science and Technology would ban 14 items and restrict 26. Technologies already public through open source or papers would sit outside the list.

That split is the whole design. Finished goods, app logins and last summer’s open model files would keep moving. The next weight dump, a perovskite production line and a gene-therapy platform would need a file in Beijing first.

Beijing Wants to Sell the Panel and Keep the Recipe

The ministries posted joint announcement No. 48 of 2026 as a draft revision of the Catalogue of Technologies Prohibited and Restricted from Export. Public comments run from Oct. 16 to Nov. 15. The notice itself is a consultation. The registration rule is not: it took effect with the posting and lasts until the catalog is formally revised.

A commerce ministry spokesperson said catalog updates have been routine since 2001 and that this round “does not target any specific country, region or entity.” The same briefing listed the 40 additions as 23 AI items, covering large models, agents, computing clusters and information processing; 12 photovoltaic items covering polysilicon, wafers and cells, including core equipment that carries those processes; and 5 biomedicine items covering cell and gene therapy, small nucleic-acid drugs and pathogen-related technology.

THE 40 ADDITIONS IN THE DRAFT

Across those three fields the draft would prohibit 14 technologies and restrict 26. The banned examples named in the briefing include AI-driven malicious-code generation and mutation, proprietary cell and gene therapy process platforms, and perovskite and tandem battery-module production. The restricted examples include AI-assisted vulnerability mining, proprietary new-target discovery for cell and gene therapy, and polysilicon plant engineering for a single line of at least 30,000 metric tons a year.

Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at Omdia, called the package a reply to Western sovereignty rules on AI, robotics, telecoms and other key technologies, aimed at regulating who gets Chinese know-how. Gary Ng, a senior economist at Natixis, said access to technologies is fragmenting along with trade and investment. Both readings can sit next to the official line. The catalog still lets China ship the thing it makes. It puts a clerk between a foreign buyer and the process that makes it.

Four Transfers Now Need a Pre-Export File

From Oct. 16, anyone exporting a listed technology must log the deal on the ministry’s technology-trade system before it leaves. Unfinished transfers are in scope. The notice names four acts that count.

WHAT MUST BE REGISTERED FROM OCT. 16

• Ownership transfers: Sending intellectual property or other technical ownership to a party outside China.
• Overseas licences: Authorising a foreign user to exploit the technology without selling the title.
• Change of control: Shifting the owner or actual controller of the Chinese technology to a foreign person.
• Other notified cases: Any further form the commerce ministry later says must be logged.

Each filing asks for the exporter, the foreign recipient, the destination, the technology and its use, and a expected export value. Several items going to the same recipient can share one form. Other cases should be filed separately. The paperwork is a census of know-how leaving the country, not a customs stamp on a crate of modules.

Products made with the listed processes are outside the draft. So is most equipment that does not carry a controlled process. The ministries said they had already taken views from research institutes, industry groups and major firms, and that they will drop items from the catalog later if the technology ages out.

Kimi K3 Already Sits Outside the Gate

The AI chapter would be a wall if it applied to files already on the internet. The announcement says it does not. Technology that has entered the public domain through open source or academic papers is not in the management scope. That sentence does more work than the national-security rhetoric around it.

Moonshot AI, the Beijing lab behind Kimi, posted Kimi K3 as a 2.8-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model with native vision and a 1-million-token context window, and it put the weights on Hugging Face on July 27.

Releasing the model weights and technical report of Kimi K3.

Kimi K3 is our most capable model: a 2.8T MoE model with native visual understanding and a 1M-token context window.

New model architecture: 2.5x the intelligence per unit of compute, not just more params.

Alongside… pic.twitter.com/Yz5uWeMbIm

— Kimi.ai (@Kimi_Moonshot) July 27, 2026

The lab said K3 activates 104 billion parameters per token. The open Kimi K3 weights on Hugging Face are already public, so the draft’s own carve-out would leave that checkpoint alone. Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-Max is among the other Chinese models described as already sitting above a 2-trillion-parameter line. The draft names no model.

The irony is mechanical. Chinese labs spent 2026 putting large open weights in front of foreign developers who could not buy the same U.S. frontier systems. The catalog now treats the next drop of that kind as an export. The files that already left are the precedent Beijing is trying not to repeat.

How Far Does the 2 Trillion Parameter Test Reach?

Translations of the draft annex circulating with the notice would restrict the core technology of a large model, including weights, checkpoints, source code, architecture and training or inference methods, if the model meets any one of three tests.

THE THREE TESTS IN THE DRAFT ANNEX

• Training compute: A run of at least 10^26 floating-point operations.
• Parameter count: At least 2 trillion parameters.
• Leaderboard rank: A globally leading level, described in those translations as a world top-10 showing on selected measures.

A separate prohibited tier would cover core technology of models trained on state core data under China’s Data Security Law, and agents built for national defence, critical information infrastructure and core government work. Restricted chip items named in official-adjacent briefings include design technology for 2.5-dimensional and 3-dimensional AI chips and for 3-dimensional flash memory.

The spokesperson’s Q&A is more useful than the annex for anyone who actually ships a model. The test of whether a “going-out” form counts as a technology export is whether restricted technology moves from inside China to outside it. Overseas localisation of a restricted model would be in scope. Putting that model on a firm’s own overseas cloud could get automatic licensing. Using a restricted model to offer API calls sit outside the catalog, as do app or web chat, SaaS and lightweight on-device builds.

New open-source releases of restricted AI, Chinese-owned overseas compute centres, overseas chip tape-outs, joint research that uses foreign resources, and work on international standards would get automatic licensing that officials say should clear almost as soon as it is filed. That is a gate that is designed to stay open. It is still a gate. A delayed stamp on a 2-trillion-parameter drop would show up as a slipped release date long before anyone published a denial.

In June, the U.S. Commerce Department asked Anthropic to keep foreign nationals off some of its strongest models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, then lifted the order. Washington has treated model access as a security object. Beijing is now treating Chinese weights the same way, with a domestic twist: keep the chat window open, licence the file.

Perovskite Lines, Not Finished Panels

The solar chapter is the harder cut, because the thing being withheld is the factory, not a download. The International Energy Agency has put China’s share in all manufacturing stages exceeds 80 percent, more than double China’s share of global demand, and has said the country is home to the world’s ten leading suppliers of solar manufacturing equipment. The same study counted more than $50 billion of Chinese investment in new PV supply capacity since 2011, ten times Europe, and more than 300,000 manufacturing jobs along the chain.

The draft would add 12 photovoltaic technologies. Finished cells and modules made with those processes would still be free to ship. The controlled object is the process, and the equipment that carries a process that meets the cut. The spokesperson said photovoltaic technology is showing up in aerospace, defence, unmanned systems and high-security infrastructure, and that export of a production line, including install, debug and upgrade work, should go through a technology-export licence and then through foreign-exchange, bank, tax and customs steps.

SOLAR THRESHOLDS IN THE DRAFT

Restricted solar items also include specified high-end processes for TOPCon, back-contact and heterojunction cells, including some p-type heterojunction work under air-mass-zero light used in space. Anything below those cuts would remain free. Unlisted PV equipment would, in principle, stay outside the notice.

For governments trying to stand up non-Chinese module plants, that is a different problem from a tariff on panels. The plant is the bottleneck. A licence on the line, the recipe and the commissioning crew is how a supplier stays a supplier without becoming a teacher. Biotech follows the same pattern in miniature: five additions, with outbound licences that do not transfer ownership steered toward automatic clearance, and public-health or humanitarian shipments of restricted items promised the same fast track.

The Catalog Repeats Xi’s September Safety Lines

The commerce ministry said it is imposing the AI controls to reinforce a security bottom line, prevent misuse and abuse, and keep AI under human control. Those are the same three ideas Xi Jinping used in September, when he told the United States the two sides should jointly prevent the misuse and abuse of AI and keep it under human control, during talks that also sketched a channel for AI incidents and a further meeting in November.

The purpose is to reinforce the security bottom line, prevent misuse and abuse, and ensure that AI remains under human control.

Commerce ministry spokesperson, Q&A on the draft catalog

The spokesperson added that China wants dialogue with other countries on AI spread and loss-of-control risk, and that exports needed for capacity-building among members of a world AI cooperation body would get extra help. The catalog is being sold as a safety instrument in the same week the two governments are still trying to define what an AI incident is. One document licences weights. The other promises a phone call if something goes wrong.

HOW THE LIST GOT HERE

1. 2002: The first Catalogue of Technologies Prohibited or Restricted from Export takes effect under the foreign-trade law and the technology import-export rules.
2. 2008 and 2020: The ministries revise the list twice, adding and dropping entries as the underlying rules require.
3. December 21, 2023: A further revision cuts the list from 164 entries to a 2023 catalog of 134 technology entries, deleting 34, adding 4 and rewriting 37, including a new ban on human cell cloning and gene editing.
4. September 2026: U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Vice Premier He Lifeng discuss an AI-incident channel; Xi and Donald Trump then agree to keep talking, with a further AI session planned for November.
5. October 16, 2026: Announcement No. 48 opens comments on 40 new items and starts pre-export registration, including for deals already under way.
6. November 15, 2026: The comment window closes. The catalog itself is still a draft until the ministries issue a final revision.

The comment file closes on Nov. 15. Until a final catalog appears, every listed transfer still has to be logged, including deals already in motion. The next Chinese model that clears 2 trillion parameters, and the next overseas perovskite line that needs a Chinese crew, will show whether “report and export” is a stamp or a wait.