23 AI ITEMS ON THE LIST — MODEL WEIGHTS AND SOURCE CODE GET THE NET FOR THE FIRST TIME

China's Ministry of Commerce and Ministry of Science and Technology proposed on October 16 adding 40 technologies to the national export control list, 23 of them in artificial intelligence. The AI set covers large language models, agents, chip designs and computing clusters, and brings trained model weights and source code into the export-control regime for the first time, where previously the rules had mainly reached the hardware underneath them.

Across the full catalogue, 14 items are proposed for prohibition and 26 for restriction, with weights and source code falling in scope only when products exceed certain performance thresholds. Access through APIs, websites, apps and software-as-a-service platforms is exempted, as is technology already in the public domain through open-source releases or academic publications.