China Proposes Export Controls on AI Models Above 2 Trillion Parameters, Agents and Chip Designs

China's Ministry of Commerce and Ministry of Science and Technology on October 16 proposed adding 23 AI technologies to the national export control catalogue, including large models, agents, chip designs and computing clusters. The AI items sit inside a broader revision covering 40 technologies across AI, biomedicine and solar power, which Beijing justified on national security grounds. Public comments close on November 15.

The draft would cover models with at least 2 trillion parameters, or models that rank in the world's top 10 on tests of performance and safety, and it reaches weights, source code and other core components. According to a summary of the ministry text, technologies already made public through open-source releases or academic papers fall outside the rules. Access through APIs, websites, apps and software-as-a-service platforms is also exempt. A temporary rule that took effect on October 16 already requires a Commerce Ministry filing before a Chinese model's weights are sent abroad.

Most coverage reports the open-source carve-out as a blanket exemption. The text supports a narrower reading. The Decoder headlined the draft as tightening controls on open-weight models, and the Pillitteri summary notes that the exemption protects weights already released but says nothing about weights Chinese labs publish after the rules take effect. By that summary's account, Moonshot's Kimi K3 (2.8 trillion parameters) and Alibaba's Qwen3.8 (2.4 trillion) are exempt because their weights are already public. The text does not settle whether a successor of the same size could be posted to Hugging Face without a licence.

Total parameter count is a weak proxy for capability in mixture-of-experts models, so the top-10 ranking clause may do more of the work. DeepSeek's V4.1-Flash-1017, released with open weights on October 17, has a 552-billion-parameter backbone and falls well below the size line. None of the reporting reviewed names the leaderboard Beijing would use for the ranking test, which leaves the ministry discretion over which smaller models it captures.

The mechanism controls the artifact and leaves the service alone. A Chinese lab can keep selling API access to foreign customers. It would need approval to hand closed weights to a foreign cloud partner, to sell itself to a foreign acquirer, or to move its model into an offshore entity. China used the same tool in August 2020, when it added AI recommendation algorithms to the catalogue and gained an approval right over any transfer of TikTok's algorithm. The forced-sale talks over TikTok then continued for years.