China's First Frontier AI Export Controls: Mofcom Announcement No. 48

Posted by jonnybgood 4 hours ago

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Comments

Comment by byzantinegene 3 hours ago

https://www.mofcom.gov.cn/xwfb/xwfyrth/art/2026/art_d7661dbf...

"Second, we encourage open source, open collaboration, and resource sharing. The Chinese government is committed to making artificial intelligence a significant driving force for promoting common prosperity and safeguarding common security. To support the construction of an open source innovation ecosystem for artificial intelligence, convenient measures such as automatic licensing will be applied to technology exports involving open source AI technologies, Chinese companies building and operating their own computing centers overseas, conducting chip fabrication overseas, utilizing overseas resources for joint research and development, and participating in the formulation of international standards, basically achieving "immediate reporting and export." Technologies that have already entered the public domain through open source or published academic papers will not be included in the export management scope, creating a favorable environment for international exchange and cooperation in artificial intelligence technology."

their official stance suggests they remain in support of open-weights

Comment by RobotToaster 1 hour ago

Interesting way to encourage open weights models. It sounds like anyone wanting to export closed AI will have to apply for a licence.

Comment by yorwba 58 minutes ago

Companies making closed-weight models typically don't export them at all, but sell access to them as a service. (Which doesn't count as an export of the model.) So it's primarily companies releasing open weights (if they pass the thresholds for the restricted category), or that host their models in datacenters outside China that will need to apply for an export license.

Comment by siva7 24 minutes ago

> Which doesn't count as an export of the model.

Says who?

Comment by yorwba 14 minutes ago

Said the Ministry of Commerce at the press conference for the draft export controls: https://www.mofcom.gov.cn/xwfb/xwfyrth/art/2026/art_d7661dbf... 对于企业利用限制类大模型对外提供API调用、APP/网页交互、SaaS应用、本地端侧轻量化部署等情形，不属于大模型技术出口管理范围。

Comment by usrnm 3 hours ago

What governments do is, generally, much more important than what they say. And what they're doing here is moving in the direction of restriction

Comment by jacquesm 2 hours ago

No, what they've been doing so far is changing nothing.

What they are saying is that they won't be changing anything.

That could of course change overnight.

There are multiple aspects to this: China is cottoning on to the meaning of soft power, and besides that being a major supplier of AI related models, services and hardware further cements their place in the world economy. They may not be able to compete directly with the USA in this domain but they are able to undercut them.

Of course there are risks as well. Models produced and released into the wild for which you have not seen the training and conditioning data could have payloads that you'd rather not have. But the same thing goes for service providers in other countries as well. You can't really trust hosted inference, not to tell you the truth in so far as is was present in the training data (censorship, not inference errors) and not to leak your information.

Comment by yorwba 1 hour ago

The proposed export controls do add some categories where export is completely prohibited. For example, sandbox detection. While the provisions specifically for AI models are generous enough, it's still possible that they trigger some other prohibition by being too capable. The statement about encouraging open source only applies to cases where export is merely restricted, not prohibited, and even then companies need to report their intention to export in advance, in principle giving the government the opportunity to deny them an export license.

So they're changing some things.

Comment by 28304283409234 2 hours ago

“Mind people's actions over words.“ -Zed

“Right now, your government is doing things you think only other governments do.” -Van Halen, Right Now

Comment by Iolaum 2 hours ago

Care to substantiate that? Not that I disagree, just curious.

My (not thorougly informed) take is that they are are taking measures to have the capability of restriction but are also adding provisions so that this capability does not add friction to the current practice of enabling export of open weight models.

So to me it's like they are keeping their options open rather than leaning on one versus the other.

Comment by virtualritz 1 hour ago

I think you're contradicting yourself here.

What they will do remains to be seen. The document at hand is what they're saying.

I.e. less important if we follow your own assessment.

Comment by _fw 3 hours ago

I understand why China wants to restrict exports of their models.

But I feel the only reason Chinese models have been able to gain such popularity is BECAUSE they are open source.

I wouldn’t trust models from China enough to use them in important work unless they were open.

Restricting any powerful Chinese model [that ranks in the global top 10] is going to make them very difficult to advocate for, and very hard for global users to adopt.

Feels like this could be the beginning of the end of the democratisation of powerful AI.

And yes, I appreciate the irony that Chinese models have been the ones enabling that democratisation!

Comment by satvikpendem 2 hours ago

Why do they care about global usage though? This seems primarily so that they can control it for their billion plus population, they really don't need global users at all, much to our chagrin.

Comment by vintermann 2 hours ago

Probably the same reason that Meta gave: it's less important to control it, and more important to prevent someone else from controlling it entirely.

Comment by vrganj 2 hours ago

Soft Power, both in the obvious and the less obvious sense.

A model is never neutral. A model is always also a way of disseminating an ideology, and it doesn't need to be lying for that to work.

Consider the question "what caused the French revolution?"

There's many ways to answer this while being technically correct. What gets prioritized, what gets omitted, that's where the ideology lives.

Comment by willis936 1 hour ago

>I wouldn’t trust models from China enough to use them in important work unless they were open.

So you've inspected the weights for backdoors?

Comment by vkou 3 hours ago

I agree - some parts of this seem very much like a footgun.

Comment by bilbo0s 2 hours ago

It's actually extremely smart.

Latest and greatest China is able to make is reserved for the use of businesses and entities in the Chinese market.

Everyone else gets access to models of more limited capabilities.

It's basically the US strategy. Obvious difference being only that the Chinese allow on prem hosting of the lesser models. So plus one to them I guess.

If we want to move China or the US on from the whole, "super intelligence models for me, more limited intelligence models for everyone else" strategy, then "everyone else" will have to come up with some models competitive with the latest and greatest from the US and China. Absent that, there's just no pressure to bring the US and China to the "share the wealth" table.

Unfortunately, "everyone else" coming up with a competitive model is not gonna happen anytime soon.

Comment by vkou 2 hours ago

The pressure for them to export models is that doing so super-charges the growth of the domestic industry. Same reason why they export solar panels, instead of just hoarding all of them for domestic deployment.

Comment by Razengan 1 hour ago

Let's just hope that both US and Chinese models remain usable enough by the masses for long enough for someone in Europe or Japan or some other actual free country to make a truly open AI :')

Comment by swiftcoder 3 hours ago

These rules are not new, right? They appear to match the previous guidance (restrictions on top-10 models, exemption for open-source collaboration)

Comment by tristanj 2 hours ago

Yes, this happened weeks ago and was never discussed on HN.

Part of the problem is that there are too many major stories happen back-to-back nowadays, and important stories like this one never get discussed. HN only shows 30 stories on the front page, which limits discussion.

Comment by satvikpendem 2 hours ago

Correct, this news just hasn't gotten traction until now on HN it seems, as I've already seen this news on r/LocalLlama and thought it was another piece of newer news.

Comment by xtajv 1 hour ago

[grouchy]

somebody wake me up when we have "SLSA, but for model provenance".

I don't (just) want "open weight + verified distribution". I want a dang audit trail.

If/when one of these models is trusted enough to make real decisions with teeth, and if/when one of those decisions screws up badly enough to hurt somebody, I want to be able to play back the tape and pinpoint the source dataset + training method responsible for the failure. At LEAST at a coarse level, on par with something like modern RPO SLAs.

P.S. this comment is applicable to pretrained models in general. I don't care if it came from China, USA, or model weights scrawled in sharpie on a random bathroom stall. I just want to know the provenance and have enough information to run a blameless "git blame" (or equivalent) if/when things go wrong.

P.P.S. IMHO, we aren't there (yet), but OTOH this proposal ain't a bad place to start.

Comment by foo42 3 hours ago

slightly ot, but this seems like a good place to ask, since I don't think I have the strategic-business mind to understand it all myself: What's the play here with China having supported publishing open weight models this far? I know the official line is for the good of mankind and all that, but presumably it's more strategic than that. Soft power? Commoditise your competition?

Comment by ycosynot 1 minute ago

I'm pretty daft with this but my opinion is that they are open source so they can help Russia war efforts (and maybe Iran) unofficially and indirectly.

Comment by petesergeant 1 hour ago

It’s hard to believe these open models aren’t putting downward pressure on how much investment US AI companies are able to attract.

Comment by realusername 2 hours ago

The US economy highly depends on the valuation of the tech giants whereas the Chinese economy doesn't.

Additionally, the financial and technological equilibrium which makes OpenAI or Anthropic possible is rather precarious so they are poking on it, hoping to make it fall.

Comment by karinago 1 hour ago

[flagged]

Comment by possiblymaybe93 2 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by byzantinegene 2 hours ago

there's alot of reasons, but one of the more commonly cited ones is that China facing chip restrictions means they lack the compute to provide the models for global usage, and making them open-weight is one of the ways to circumvent these restrictions.

Comment by christkv 2 hours ago

We really need a foundation that trains open source models. You know what like OpenAI was supposed to be.

Comment by tristanj 1 hour ago

That's not happening without significant funding. The cost of the primary training run for frontier models is in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and is increasing with every iteration. The Astra pre-train likely cost close to a billion dollars.

The Chinese open-source models (which are 1-2 generations behind the frontier) cost in the low tens of millions to train. This is largely because of a lack of compute. They achieve comparable performance to frontier models via distillation.

Comment by lisa_lin93 3 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by pelagicAustral 1 hour ago

I guess China didnt got the memo with the rebranding of AI to Super Intelligence. They should really watch themselves, they might end up making the big orange baby angry.

Comment by 38383883 24 minutes ago

Have an upvote kind sir!

Comment by imhereagain 42 minutes ago

You are confusing babies and murderers