China's first frontier AI export controls: Ministry of Commerce Announcement No. 48 of 2026

On October 16, 2026, China's Ministry of Commerce and Ministry of Science and Technology issued Announcement No. 48 of 2026, proposing to add 40 technologies to the prohibited or restricted export catalog, of which 23 are artificial intelligence, while also launching pre-export registration requirements that have already taken effect. The draft sets three alternative thresholds for frontier model weights: training compute of no less than 10^26 FLOPs, parameter count of no less than 2 trillion, or, at the time of export, entering the global top ten on indicators such as public benchmark rankings and global call volume; agents are separately controlled by behavioral thresholds such as planning steps, concurrency, and number of integrated tools, and high-performance agents for critical infrastructure, national defense, and core government affairs are listed as prohibited. According to the Ministry of Commerce, API, SaaS, and lightweight on-device use do not count as export, while overseas local deployment of restricted models requires a license. The draft catalog is open for comment until November 15, and the registration requirements already apply to exports, including those not yet completed.