China proposes export controls on 23 AI technologies, including its largest models and advanced chip designs

China's commerce and science ministries have released a draft update to the country's list of banned and restricted export technologies. It adds 23 AI technologies across large models, AI agents, chip designs, computing clusters and data processing. The full proposal has 40 items, including 12 solar items and five in biomedicine. For large models, the controls would cover weights, source code and other core parts. They would apply to models trained on China's "important data," or to models that have at least 2 trillion parameters, used 10^26 FLOPs of training compute, or rank in the world's top 10. Bloomberg and the Associated Press report that Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 and Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Max are above the size threshold, though the draft does not name any model. AI tools that can write or alter malware on their own to attack critical infrastructure, the military or government agencies would be banned from export entirely. Some vulnerability-finding tools would face new limits instead. The draft also covers design know-how for AI chips made at 14 nanometres or below or built with 2.5D or 3D stacking, along with some memory chip designs. Open-source code and published research are exempt. According to The Decoder, open-weight releases would be approved automatically once registered. Chinese companies could keep serving users abroad through apps, websites and APIs. A temporary export registration rule took effect on October 16, and comments are open until November 15.