China proposes export controls on large models, AI agents and compute clusters, but says API services and already open-sourced tech aren't covered

China's proposed AI export controls leave the ways most developers outside China use Chinese models untouched, according to the government's own explanation. On October 16 the Ministry of Commerce and the Ministry of Science and Technology published a draft that would add 23 AI technologies, covering large models, agents, compute clusters and information processing, to the country's Catalogue of Technologies Prohibited or Restricted from Export. In its official Q&A, the commerce ministry said that using restricted large models to offer API calls, app or web chat, SaaS products or lightweight on-device deployment falls outside large-model technology export controls, and technology already released as open source isn't covered either. What the rules target is moving a model's core technology abroad or deploying a restricted model locally overseas. The ministry said "the vast majority of AI technologies" could still be exported freely once the measures take effect.

This is a proposal open for public comment until November 15, not a final rule. One part does apply already: from the day of the notice until the revised catalogue is formally issued, anyone exporting a technology on the draft list has to register it with the commerce ministry first. That covers transferring ownership of a technology abroad, licensing it for use outside China, or a technology's owner or controller changing to a foreign entity.

For developers using models such as GLM, Qwen, Kimi or MiniMax through an API or a coding plan, the ministry's explanation means nothing changes. Localized deployment of a restricted model overseas does count as an export, though even that can go through automatic licensing if it runs on the company's own overseas cloud.

The open-source exemption has two parts. A footnote covering the whole AI section says technology that has already entered the public domain through open-source releases or published papers isn't covered at all. A second footnote says that open-sourcing a restricted technology in the future, along with cases like Chinese companies running their own data centers abroad, will qualify for automatic licensing, which the ministry describes as basically "approved as soon as it's filed."

The draft splits the list into prohibited and restricted items. Across all three fields in the notice, 14 technologies would be banned from export and 26 restricted. On the AI side, the banned items include AI-driven malware generation and mutation tools that can attack critical infrastructure, defense or core government systems, and deepfake detection equipment built for China's cross-border data security. Large models trained on China's "core data" and high-performance agents built for those same sensitive settings would also be banned.

The restricted list is where the thresholds get specific. Large models trained on China's "important data" are restricted, with an exception for models that used only a tiny amount (0.1% or less) under certain safeguards. So is the core technology of large models, meaning weights, key checkpoints, source code, architecture and training or inference optimization, if the model meets any one of three conditions. It was trained with at least 10^26 floating-point operations, it has at least 2 trillion parameters, or its "capability reaches a globally leading level," which the draft defines as ranking in the global top 10, at the time of export, in public assessments by mainstream evaluation bodies in China and abroad, large industry platforms and similar sources, covering overall performance, specialized capabilities, global usage, safety performance, training efficiency and the like. Agent technology is restricted above set lines, such as breaking an instruction into 20 or more executable steps, coordinating 60 or more agents at once, or integrating 200 or more third-party tools. AI chip design and compute clusters with more than 10,000 accelerator cards round out the list.

The same notice covers biomedicine and solar. Five biomedical technologies in cell and gene therapy, small nucleic acid drugs and pathogenic microorganisms are on the list, and 12 solar technologies span polysilicon, wafer and cell manufacturing.

The commerce ministry says the revision is routine and "not aimed at any particular country, region or entity," and notes that major economies already control exports in these fields. Comments can be sent to the ministry by email, fax or letter until November 15.