The 60-second version
MOFCOM and MOST propose adding 23 AI technologies to China's export control catalogue, with thresholds like 2 trillion parameters or 10^26 FLOPs, but API access and open-source release remain outside scope.

China proposes adding large models, agents, and AI chip design to its export control catalogue with numeric thresholds, while a registration duty for technology transfers is already in force.

MOFCOM and MOST propose adding 23 AI technologies to China's export control catalogue, with thresholds like 2 trillion parameters or 10^26 FLOPs, but API access and open-source release remain outside scope.

Evidence labels used below: CONFIRMED, GOVERNMENT STATEMENT (official rationale/purpose claims, not independently verifiable), INDEPENDENT EVIDENCE, PRESS REPORT, INTERPRETATION, PREDICTION.
story_count: 10. This artifact covers exactly one assigned story: S04.| Date type | Value | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Actual event date | 2026-10-16 (MOFCOM + MOST issued Announcement No. 48 of 2026; posted 16:00 Beijing ≈ 08:00 UTC) | MOFCOM announcement page timestamp 2026-10-16 16:00; document date 发文日期 2026年10月16日 |
| Announcement date | 2026-10-16 (same day; no lag) | MOFCOM announcement |
| Interim obligation start | 2026-10-16 (pre-export registration in force from publication) | Announcement §三; MOFCOM spokesperson Q&A; TokenPost (08:00 UTC) |
| Public-comment window | 2026-10-16 → 2026-11-15 | MOFCOM announcement §二 |
| Article dates | 2026-10-16: The Verge (10:54 UTC), Dow Jones/Morningstar (10:20 GMT), TNW (13:08 UTC), TokenPost (14:39 EDT), Xinhua (23:11 Beijing), AP (dated "Friday", byline date not rendered in retrieved text); 2026-10-17: cnblogs analysis; 2026-10-18: TechNode (outside window — coverage date only, event date unchanged) | each source page |
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FACT (CONFIRMED): On 16 October 2026, MOFCOM and MOST jointly issued Announcement No. 48 of 2026 (商务部 科技部公告2026年第48号), titled "Seeking public comment on revising the Catalogue of Technologies Prohibited or Restricted from Export, and implementing temporary registration management for exports of the relevant technologies".
Key operative content, read directly from the primary Chinese text:
https://ecomp.mofcom.gov.cn).jinxianmulu@mofcom.gov.cn, fax 010-65197565, or post to Bureau of Security and Control, MOFCOM, 2 Dong Chang'an Avenue, Beijing 100731).Before: China's export-control regime covered the Catalogue items in force (revised repeatedly since 2001; the last publicly reported cycle predates this announcement), and its export controls were overwhelmingly associated with physical/technical items — with AI largely outside the Catalogue. US export controls on advanced chips and chipmaking tools were the dominant instrument of AI-technology restriction. Chinese frontier model weights, agent stacks and AI chip design know-how could be licensed, transferred abroad and deployed overseas without a dedicated pre-export filing.
Change (CONFIRMED): A draft that, for the first time, places frontier AI software — large-model core technology, agent technology, AI chip design and AI compute-cluster technology — inside China's technology export catalogue, with granular numeric control thresholds, plus an immediately binding pre-export registration duty covering ownership transfers, overseas licensing and transfers of ownership/control of a Chinese technology owner to an overseas entity.
After (as proposed): Four distinct instruments now apply or would apply to Chinese AI technology moving abroad:
The Catalogue sits under the Foreign Trade Law and the Regulations on the Administration of Technology Import and Export. Technologies listed as prohibited (禁止类) cannot be exported; technologies listed as restricted (限制类) require a technology export licence from MOFCOM, with downstream FX, banking, tax and customs procedures conditioned on that licence (MOFCOM states this explicitly for photovoltaic production-line exports). The revision was issued as a draft for public comment, so the specific items and thresholds can still change.
Annex 1 ("Scope of AI, biomedicine and photovoltaic technologies proposed for inclusion… (draft for comment)") was downloaded from the MOFCOM announcement page as a WPS/Word file and text-extracted for this research . The AI section consists of 11 catalogue entries — 4 prohibited (suffix J) and 7 restricted (suffix X) — each carrying granular numeric "control points" (控制要点). MOFCOM counts these as 23 key AI technologies across the four named groups.
Prohibited (禁止出口) AI entries:
| Code | Name | Control point (condensed, from annex) |
|---|---|---|
| 266401J | High-performance detection technology | Authentication/deepfake detection systems & equipment mainly used for China's cross-border data-transfer security risk prevention, detection accuracy & recall ≥95% |
| 266402J | Information-confrontation technology | Three clusters, any threshold: (a) AI-driven autonomous malicious-code generation & mutation — attack success ≥60% vs multi-engine malware detectors, ≥85% vs a single mainstream AV, ≥90% vs ML models; (b) adversarial-environment adaptive evolution / runtime behaviour modification — sandbox/debugger/emulator detection or sandbox escape, or auto-rewriting ≥50% of code structure or control flow per execution while preserving malicious function; (c) automated AV-evasion variant batch generation & distributed deployment — ≥20 functionally equivalent variants per run or end-to-end automation ≥80%; ≥10 variants per 24h with syntax-tree difference ≥30% from one baseline payload; behavioural-profile consistency in sandbox ≥90% |
| 266501J | AI large-model technology | Large models trained using China's "core data" (核心数据, scope set by the Data Security Law) and then used to provide services |
| 266502J | AI agent technology | Agents mainly used in highly sensitive scenarios (critical information infrastructure, defence/military, core government) reaching "high performance" — defined by reference to the restricted agent thresholds (266505X) |
Restricted (限制出口) AI entries:
| Code | Name | Control point (condensed, from annex) |
|---|---|---|
| 266402X | High-performance detection technology | Adds to existing 7 items: deepfake video/audio/image/multimodal detection systems ≥98% accuracy & recall; steganography/extraction with BER ≤0.5% or recall ≥99.9%, FPR ≤0.1%, SSIM ≥0.999 / PSNR ≥41 dB / LPIPS ≤0.005 |
| 266404X | Information-confrontation technology | Adds AI-assisted vulnerability discovery: benchmark exploitability scoring ≥75%; end-to-end exploit-chain success ≥50% (mainstream OS/browser) or ≥40% (arbitrary code execution); ≥10× senior-expert efficiency or 10× more exploitable-vulnerability findings; autonomously chains ≥2 low/medium flaws into a runnable multi-stage PoC; autonomously finds ≥5 previously unknown high-severity flaws (or ≥50 unknown flaws) in one major open-source project or mainstream OS in a single run; top tier of national/international exploit-capability grading |
| 266501X | Information-processing technology | Adds to existing 18 items: (19) voiceprint recognition — TPR ≥99.1% at FPR ≤0.01%, latency ≤300 ms with throughput ≥100 req/s, spoof-detection ≥98% or FAR ≤1%, plus minority-language/dialect optimisation ≥90%; (20) translation for Chinese and minority languages — human MOS ≥4.8, semantic fidelity ≥95% with BLEU ≥35 (general) or ≥30 (professional domains) |
| 266504X | AI large-model technology | (1) Large models trained on China's "important data" (重要数据) and then serving; (2) core large-model technology — weights, key checkpoints, underlying source code, architecture design, training optimisation, inference acceleration — meeting any of: compute ≥10²⁶ FLOPs (rendered in extracted text as 1026次浮点运算), parameters ≥20,000亿 (= 2 trillion), or "globally leading capability" — defined as global top-10 at export time in public evaluations by mainstream bodies/platforms across comprehensive performance, specialised capability, global call volume, safety and training efficiency. Exclusion: models trained with only a ≤0.1% share of important data, de-identified, not reproducible in output, or lawfully public |
| 266505X | AI agent technology | (1) Autonomous planning & task decomposition: natural-language instruction split into ≥20-step executable subtask chains, decomposition accuracy ≥80%, average subtask success ≥90%; (2) multi-agent collaboration architecture: ≥60 concurrent agents, total completion time ≤2× the fastest single-agent time, answer agreement ≥85%; (3) tool use & system operation: ≥200 integrated third-party tools, tool-selection accuracy ≥90%, end-to-end success ≥90% across 3+ tool-type combinations; (4) AI game/decision technology: decision depth ≥20 steps or ≥10 concurrent game agents, adaptive strategy with ≤200 ms latency and ≥10 control units, exceeding 90% of humans on standard game benchmarks |
| 266506X | AI chip-design technology | (1) AI processing-chip design (architecture, instruction sets, IP cores, software stacks) meeting any: ≤14 nm process, floating-point/integer compute, 2.5D/3D advanced packaging, high-speed interconnect, non-Von-Neumann architectures (compute-in-memory, neuromorphic), or use in autonomous driving/CV/speech; (2) memory-chip design — 3D NAND: density ≥8 Gb/mm², I/O ≥1.5 Gbps, or bonding; DRAM: ≤18 nm process, vertical-channel transistor, bonding, or multilayer stacking |
| 266507X | AI compute-cluster technology | (1) chip/node interconnect bidirectional bandwidth ≥800 GB/s; (2) distributed-training fault tolerance: MTTR ≤120 s, visible interruption ≤30 s, GPU effective-compute waste ≤5%; (3) communication scheduling: linear scaling ≥98%, end-to-end latency ≤1 µs, comm-hiding ≥90%; (4) heterogeneous scheduling across ≥2 vendors' AI chips: bandwidth utilisation ≥90% or cross-node latency ≤5 µs, throughput +≥30% / utilisation +≥65% / cost −≥20% / MTTR ≤10 min with availability ≥99.9%, cross-geography scheduling efficiency ≥80%. Note: "large-scale intelligent compute cluster" = >10,000 AI accelerator cards |
Per announcement §三 and the spokesperson Q&A, from 2026-10-16 until the revised Catalogue is formally implemented, before exporting any technology listed in the announcement's annexes the exporter must register on MOFCOM's technology-trade information application (https://ecomp.mofcom.gov.cn). Registrable situations:
Information required: exporter and recipient basics, destination country/region, technology and its intended use, estimated export value. Exports already started but not completed are within scope. Exporters must self-assess whether they fall in scope. Registration is a filing, not an approval — it is not the same as a future export licence.
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https://ecomp.mofcom.gov.cn.计算量≥1026次浮点运算 is almost certainly ≥10²⁶ FLOPs (superscript lost in plain-text conversion). This single figure should be re-checked against the formatted original before publication.--
Impact: This is the clearest illustration yet that AI is now governed like a strategic industry: capability thresholds (parameters, FLOPs, agent step-depth) are written into trade law. The concepts worth learning are export control, data classification (core/important data), open-source licensing, and the difference between transferring technology and serving a service.
Recommended action: LEARN. Study the difference between technology export and service access using MOFCOM's own examples; read the four registration scenarios; practise converting a headline ("China bans AI exports") into the accurate statement ("China proposes catalogue controls with an API carve-out; a registration duty is already in force").
Impact: Architecture and vendor decisions now have a regulatory dimension: where technology transfers, where only services flow, and who controls the entity. Any team using Chinese model weights, agent stacks or cluster software in a cross-border product should map their flows against Annex 1.
Recommended action: EVALUATE (and register where applicable).
https://ecomp.mofcom.gov.cn for in-scope flows; keep evidence of open-source/public-domain status for claimed exemptions.Impact: Two questions become urgent: (a) Does any part of our AI strategy depend on transferring Chinese-controlled technology across a border — including via acquisition or investment? (b) Is our international product architecture built on the API/SaaS carve-out, and how durable is that carve-out? This changes investment sequencing, M&A timing and market-entry design for anything touching Chinese AI.
Recommended action: GOVERN + MONITOR.
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VERIFY —. Download MOFCOM Announcement No. 48 and Annex 1, extract the annex text, verify the headline claims (40 technologies / 23 AI / 14 prohibited / 26 restricted; ≥2T parameters; open-source exclusion; registration in force), then classify four concrete export scenarios against the registration criteria. Purpose: validate the story from primary artefacts rather than from headlines.
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Near-term watch points
https://ecomp.mofcom.gov.cn; any MOFCOM FAQ/guidance on scope self-assessment; cases where in-flight transactions were pulled into scope.Longer-term
China did not ban AI exports. On 16 October 2026, MOFCOM and MOST published a draft revision of their technology export catalogue that would place 23 AI technologies — large models, agents, AI chip designs and compute-cluster software — under prohibited/restricted export control, with hard, quotable thresholds (2 trillion parameters, 10²⁶ FLOPs, global top-10, 60 concurrent agents, 200 tools, ≤14 nm chip design) and explicit escape hatches: open-sourced or published technology is out of scope, and API/app/SaaS access is not treated as a technology export. The consultation runs to 15 November 2026, and the catalogue change is not yet law. What is already binding is the same announcement's temporary pre-export registration duty, effective 16 October, covering outbound IP transfers, overseas licensing and any change putting a Chinese technology holder under foreign control — including deals already in flight. The accurate headline is therefore: China proposes frontier-AI export controls, with a registration net already live.