China drafts export controls on open-weight models and 23 key AI technologies

China plans to tighten export controls on open-weight models and 23 key AI technologies

China's commerce and science ministries released a draft revision of the technology export catalog that would put 23 key AI technologies under export control, covering large models, agents, compute clusters and data processing. A model's core technology is caught if it reaches 10^26 FLOPs of training compute, has at least 2 trillion parameters, or ranks in the global top 10. Models trained on China's "important data" and serving users from that training are also restricted.

Why it matters: China plans licensing thresholds for core large-model technology, with different procedures for overseas local servers and overseas cloud deployments, which directly shapes how models can be deployed abroad.