中国拟对23项AI技术实施出口管制，开源模型豁免

On October 16, 2026, China’s Ministry of Commerce and Ministry of Science and Technology released a draft revision to the Catalog of Technologies Prohibited and Restricted from Export. It proposes adding 40 technologies across AI, biomedicine, and solar PV, of which 23 are AI-related (covering foundation/large models, intelligent agents, computing clusters, and information processing technologies).

Public comments are open until November 15. Temporary pre-export registration requirements for the covered technologies take effect immediately.

Key points relevant to open-weight models:

• Technologies already made public via open-source releases or academic publications are explicitly exempted and not subject to the controls.

• Open-sourcing AI technologies, plus certain other activities (e.g., Chinese firms building their own overseas compute centers), are eligible for streamlined automatic licensing.

• Providing access via APIs, apps, websites, or SaaS is generally not treated as a technology export.

• Overseas local deployment of restricted models can fall under the rules (with possible facilitation in lower-risk cases such as a company’s own overseas cloud).

This is not a blanket ban on open-weight models. However, new models that have not yet been released may face registration or approval steps before their weights or source code can be transferred abroad (thresholds based on performance, parameters, data sensitivity, etc. are still being defined). Chinese labs such as DeepSeek and Qwen could see additional compliance requirements on future open releases.

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