What the draft provides
According to The Decoder, China's commerce and science ministries have published a draft revision of the catalogue of banned and restricted export technologies. The catalogue targets 23 key AI technologies across large models, agents, compute clusters and data processing.
According to the report, AI technologies that can autonomously write or alter malware to attack critical infrastructure, the military or government agencies face a total export ban. AI tools for finding software vulnerabilities are not banned outright but will face export restrictions.
Thresholds for large models
According to The Decoder, export controls on large models apply in two cases. First, when a model was trained on China's important data and offers services based on it; lawfully public data is exempt, as are tiny amounts of up to 0.1 percent if cleaned beforehand. Second, the core technologies of large models, such as model weights, source code and training methods, are controlled once one of three thresholds is reached: training compute of 10^26 floating-point operations, at least 2 trillion parameters, or a global top-10 ranking.
Fast track for open-weight models
To avoid slowing domestic open-source development, the plan provides a fast track, according to The Decoder: those who publish restricted core technologies, including model weights, as open source receive automatic licensing. Use via API calls, apps or SaaS tools remains free of controls. Technologies already publicly available are fully exempt. Until the rules take effect, affected exports must be registered through the commerce ministry's portal.
Assessment
Dean W. Ball, head of strategic futures at OpenAI, according to The Decoder, sees in this the possibility for Beijing to stop future open-weight models at will, and calls the framework a mirror image of US export controls on model weights. For Europe, this could mean that the strategy of running open models in domestic clouds becomes harder if the best open models come from China or the US. How strongly this affects imports of Chinese models into the EU cannot be reliably derived from the draft alone.
Sources
Editorially owned by Ideal Syka. Sources and method: Newsroom & method. Tips and corrections: ai@i6eal.de.
