China Proposes Export Curbs on 23 AI Items, Weights Included

China's Ministry of Commerce and Ministry of Science and Technology on October 16 proposed adding 40 technologies to the national export control list, 23 of them in artificial intelligence, Bloomberg reported. The AI set covers "large language models, agents, chip designs and computing clusters," pulling model weights and source code into a regime that until now has reached mostly the hardware beneath them.

Across the full 40-item catalogue, 14 technologies are marked as prohibited and 26 as restricted, according to Crypto Briefing's read of the draft text. Model weights and source code fall in only when products exceed certain performance thresholds, which the published summaries do not quantify. The proposal exempts access through APIs, websites, apps and software-as-a-service platforms, and leaves alone technologies already in the public domain through open-source releases or academic publications.

Public consultation runs until November 15, 2026. An interim pre-export registration requirement is already in force for the affected technologies.

The commerce ministry has been consulting Alibaba, ByteDance, Zhipu and other domestic AI and chip firms on the shape of these controls since the summer, Implicator noted. None of the 337 China AI stories we have tracked in the last 90 days on our China feed have put trained systems themselves this squarely inside Beijing's export-control perimeter.