Ministry of Commerce and Ministry of Science and Technology propose adding 23 AI technologies to the export control catalog: controlled technologies, overseas expansion scenarios and corporate responses

On October 16, 2026, the Ministry of Commerce and the Ministry of Science and Technology issued Announcement No. 48 of 2026, soliciting public comments on a revision to the Catalog of Technologies Prohibited or Restricted from Export in China, proposing to add 23 AI-related technologies, covering directions such as large models and agents, chips and computing clusters, information recognition and processing, and cybersecurity and adversarial techniques. The listing of large models uses a "choose one of three" threshold: computing power reaching 10²⁶ floating-point operations, parameter count reaching 2 trillion, or globally leading capability; the computing power threshold is comparable to California SB 53 and an order of magnitude higher than the EU AI Act. The article, combined with the Ministry of Commerce's answers to reporters' questions, analyzes that overseas localized deployment of restricted AI technologies falls within the scope of technology export management, that situations such as overseas self-owned cloud are proposed to apply automatic licensing, essentially "report and release immediately," that local on-device lightweight deployment and provision of only API and SaaS services are in principle outside this scope, and that open-sourcing models is proposed to enjoy the same convenience. Temporary registration takes effect from the date of the announcement's publication; the article recommends that companies review existing transactions, complete pre-export registration, and provide feedback during the comment period.