China has proposed export controls on its most advanced AI technology, from frontier-scale models to capable agents, while carving out open-source work. The draft, Announcement 2026 No. 48, was published on Oct 16 by the Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) and the Ministry of Science and Technology. Comments are open until Nov 15. It drew about 1,000 posts in our X sample.
The announcement is in Chinese. We read it directly. For the detailed annex thresholds and the ministry's Q&A, we rely on On The Wire's analysis, which counted the 14-page list. English renderings are translations, not official wording.
What's proposed
The announcement adds 40 technologies across three fields to China's Catalogue of Technologies Prohibited or Restricted from Export:
| Field | Items | Examples (from the announcement) |
|---|---|---|
| AI | 23 | large models, agents, compute clusters, information processing |
| Biomedicine | 5 | cell and gene therapy, small nucleic acid drugs |
| Photovoltaics | 12 | polysilicon, wafer and cell manufacturing |
On The Wire's count of the AI items: 6 proposed for prohibition, 17 for restriction.
The AI thresholds
Per On The Wire's reading of the annex, restricted items include:
- Large models: the core technology (weights, key checkpoints, source code, architecture, training optimization, inference acceleration) of models meeting any of:
- training compute of at least 10²⁶ FLOPs
- at least 2 trillion parameters
- capability ranked in the global top 10 of public evaluations at the time of export
- Agents: for example, planning that breaks an instruction into 20+ sub-tasks, or tool use across 200+ third-party tools, each with accuracy thresholds
- AI-assisted vulnerability discovery, AI and memory chip design, and compute clusters of more than 10,000 accelerator cards
Proposed prohibitions include AI generation of malicious code that could target critical infrastructure, and large models trained on China's legally defined "core data".
The open-source carve-out
The announcement is explicit: AI technologies that have already entered the public domain through open source or published academic papers are not within the scope (对已通过开源、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).
On The Wire adds an important detail: future open-source releases of restricted technology would get "automatic licensing and similar facilitation" rather than an outright exemption. The spokesperson described this as close to immediate.
What's not covered: APIs and SaaS
Per the spokesperson's note, as reported by On The Wire:
- Not covered: products made with the technology, and offering restricted models via API calls, apps, web, SaaS or lightweight on-device deployment
- Covered: localized deployment of a restricted AI technology overseas, though deployment on a company's own overseas cloud may qualify for automatic licensing
Registration starts now
Although the catalogue is a draft, the announcement requires exporters to register before exporting listed technologies from the date of publication until the revision takes effect. Exports already under way are included. That covers:
- transferring ownership of technology abroad (e.g. IP transfer)
- licensing domestic technology for use abroad
- a change of owner or actual controller to a foreign entity
- other cases MOFCOM specifies
What it means for builders
- Open-weight models you already use aren't affected by the draft as written. Weights and papers already published fall under the carve-out, and API access isn't covered.
- Watch future frontier releases. A model above the thresholds would, on On The Wire's reading, go through automatic licensing to be open-sourced. That suggests a process rather than a ban, but rules can change after comments.
- This is a draft. The final text could differ after Nov 15.
For context on the Chinese open models in the news this week, see MiniMax M3.1 Flash and the mystery Arena models Kibitz and Kalmia. If you're choosing models for a product, licenses matter as much as policy. See own your code and data.
