China is moving to control the export of its most powerful AI models. A draft rule, Announcement No. 48 from the Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) and the Ministry of Science and Technology, would add 40 technologies across AI, biotech and solar to the country's export catalogue, TechTimes reports.
What is covered
- Banned outright: models trained on "core data" under China's Data Security Law, and AI agents built for defence or critical infrastructure.
- Licence needed: models above 2 trillion parameters or ranked in the global top ten. Bloomberg and AP reporting widely puts Moonshot's Kimi K3 and Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Max in scope, TechTimes says.
- Exempt: publicly available open-source models and academic research, so existing open releases are not controlled after the fact.
The draft does not name specific models or companies. DeepSeek is not described as covered.
What applies now
An interim rule took effect on 16 October, before the final list is set. Covered transactions, including overseas licensing agreements, ownership transfers and changes of foreign control, must be registered with MOFCOM, with details of the parties, the intended use and the deal's value. Deals already under way are included.
According to TechTimes, hosting a covered model on servers outside China could count as an export, even for cloud inference. Using a model through an API or a software service does not, and companies already running downloaded open weights are not covered by the interim registration. Public comments close on 15 November. No date has been set for the final rule.
