China plans to tighten export controls on open-weight models and 23 key AI technologies
China drafted export controls on 23 AI technologies, including frontier models above set compute and size thresholds.
China's commerce and science ministries published a draft export-control update covering 23 AI technologies across large models, agents, compute clusters, and data processing. AI tools that autonomously write or alter malware to attack critical infrastructure, the military, or government agencies would face a total export ban, while some vulnerability-discovery tools would be restricted. Core large-model technology, including weights and training methods, would be controlled at 10^26 training FLOPs, at least 2 trillion parameters, or a global top-10 ranking. Already-public open-source releases and papers are exempt, and publishing restricted technology as open source would qualify for automatic licensing, while installing it on foreign local servers would still need a standard license.