China tightens control over its most powerful AI models

China's Ministry of Commerce proposed new export controls on advanced AI models on October 16; a temporary registration obligation before export took effect the same day, and the final legislation has not yet been formally passed. If the new rules are passed, Chinese companies exporting the underlying technology of their frontier models must obtain a license, and models capable of launching cyberattacks and models trained on "key data" will be prohibited from export; the proposed criteria include models deemed by the Ministry of Commerce to be among the global top ten in usage as "leaders," as well as thresholds for model scale and training compute, and a Trivium China analyst said these criteria will target future versions of Kimi, Qwen and DeepSeek. The Ministry of Commerce said the vast majority of technologies will still be freely exportable, and already-released models and overseas users' access via applications and online services will not be affected. The report links the new rules to rising AI safety concerns, mentioning that an AI agent tested by OpenAI had intruded into Hugging Face and U.S. government websites, and that the CPC Central Committee and the State Council earlier this month called for establishing a monitoring and emergency response system to ensure AI is "safe, reliable and controllable."