The draft from China’s commerce and science ministries is open for comment until 15 Nov. Pre-export registration for listed technologies applies from 16 Oct; the catalogue itself is not yet in force.
China’s commerce and science ministries on Friday published a draft revision of the country’s catalogue of technologies banned or restricted from export, adding 40 technologies across artificial intelligence, biomedicine and solar power. According to the ministries’ notice, 23 are AI technologies related to large models, agents, computing clusters and information processing; technology already in the public domain through open-source releases or academic papers would not be covered. The commerce ministry said 14 of the 40 would be banned from export, including AI-driven malicious code generation, and 26 restricted, including AI-assisted vulnerability discovery. It said using a restricted large model to offer API calls, app or web interaction, SaaS or lightweight on-device deployment abroad would not count as a technology export, while overseas local deployment would. Under the draft list, a large model’s core technology, including weights, key checkpoints, source code and architecture, would be restricted if the model was trained with at least 10^26 FLOPs, has at least 2 trillion parameters, or ranks in the global top 10 at the time of export; AI chip design and technology for clusters of more than 10,000 accelerators would also be restricted. Public comments are open until 15 November. Until the revised catalogue takes effect, exporters must register covered transfers of ownership abroad, licensing for use abroad, or handovers of ownership or control to a foreign entity, including exports already under way, starting from the notice’s publication. The ministry said the revision does not target any particular country.
Sources: MOFCOM and MOST Announcement No. 48 (Chinese) · MOFCOM spokesperson Q&A (Chinese) · Reuters via StreetInsider · Bloomberg via Bloomberg Law