China proposes export controls on AI model weights, agents and chip designs, with comment open to Nov. 15

The proposal comes from the Ministry of Commerce and the Ministry of Science and Technology. According to Bloomberg, it adds 23 AI technologies to the national export control list: LLM weights and source code, chip designs, intelligent agents and computing clusters. They sit inside a broader 40-item batch that also covers biomedicine and solar. Public consultation runs through November 15, and an interim pre-export registration requirement is already in force. It is Beijing's first attempt to restrict trained models and software rather than only hardware. Startup Fortune reports that regulators have held closed-door meetings with Alibaba, ByteDance and Zhipu on a tiered system that would cap overseas training data and foreign downloads of weights, while hosted API access would reportedly stay open. Earlier FT reporting said Beijing was weighing such curbs, and its probe of Meta's roughly $2 billion Manus deal showed it will scrutinize outbound AI transfers. For builders, DeepSeek and Qwen weights are a common base for fine-tuning and self-hosting. If future releases are gated, teams should plan for API-only access and keep a non-Chinese fallback model ready.