China's Ministry of Commerce new rules and the future of Chinese AI

China's Ministry of Commerce and Ministry of Science and Technology released a draft announcement No. 48 of 2026 on October 16, proposing to add 40 technologies to the catalog of technologies prohibited or restricted from export, of which 14 are prohibited from export and 26 require a license application, most targeting AI, and to immediately establish a pre-export registration system, with comments due by November 15. Export of large-model weights and core IP that meet any one threshold of 10^26 FLOP training compute, 2T parameters, or "globally leading level" requires a license; already-public open-source models are exempt, and new technologies released as open source are subject to automatic licensing under "report and release"; according to Epoch AI, no released Chinese model is estimated to cross the compute threshold. The controls also cover AI chip design, memory chips, ten-thousand-card-scale clusters, agents, AIGC detection tools, cyber offense and defense capabilities, and minority-language translation; models trained on "core data" are prohibited from export. The author argues that the draft, while retaining the open-model strategy, adds checkpoints for frontier releases, that the halted Meta acquisition of Manus is written into the registration trigger conditions, and that providing services to overseas customers via API or SaaS does not currently require a license.