China plans to tighten export controls on open-weight models and 23 key AI technologies

China's Ministry of Commerce and Ministry of Science and Technology published a draft update to the export control technology list, proposing to strengthen export controls on 23 key AI technologies, covering large models, agents, computing clusters, and data processing. The draft proposes a comprehensive ban on AI tools that can autonomously write or rewrite malware, or are used to attack critical infrastructure, military, or government agencies, and adds new export restrictions on some AI tools that find software vulnerabilities. Large models are controlled in two situations: first, trained on and providing services with important data as defined by the Data Security Law; second, core technologies such as weights, checkpoints, source code, architecture, and training or inference methods, with trigger thresholds of 10^26 FLOPs of training compute, at least 2 trillion parameters, or ranking in the global top ten. Technologies already released as open source or disclosed in papers are not subject to the new restrictions; open-source releases of restricted technologies can receive automatic licenses, and use via API, applications, websites, and SaaS is unrestricted, but deployment on local servers overseas requires a standard export license. OpenAI's Dean W. Ball said the framework retains the option to shut down open-weight models at any time in the future, and is a mirror of U.S. model weight export controls.