19 OCT 2026 — China's commerce and science ministries issued a joint announcement on 16 October proposing to add 40 technologies to the national list of technologies prohibited or restricted from export. From that day, companies must register with the Ministry of Commerce before they sell, grant licences for or hand control of certain artificial intelligence, biomedical and solar technologies to anyone outside China.
The list itself is only a draft, open for public comment until 15 November. The registration duty is not. It applies from the day of publication until the revised list is formally issued, and it covers deals that have already started but are not yet finished.
What the announcement does
Announcement No. 48 of 2026, signed by the Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) and the Ministry of Science and Technology, cites China's Foreign Trade Law and its regulations on technology imports and exports. It asks for views on revising the Catalogue of Technologies Prohibited and Restricted from Export, and it imposes what the text calls pre-export registration for the technologies named in its draft annex.
Of the 40 technologies, 23 are in AI, covering large models, AI agents, computing clusters and information processing. Five are biomedical, in cell and gene therapy, small nucleic acid drugs and pathogenic microorganisms. The remaining 12 are in solar manufacturing, spanning polysilicon, wafers and cells, and the solar controls extend to key equipment that carries the listed technology.
Who has to register, and when
Registration takes place on MOFCOM's online business platform before the export happens. Four situations trigger it: transferring ownership of a technology abroad, such as an assignment of intellectual property; licensing a Chinese technology for use abroad; a change that makes a foreign entity the owner or actual controller of a Chinese technology; and any other case MOFCOM specifies by notice.
The form asks for details of the exporter and the recipient, the destination country or region, the technology and its intended use, and the expected value of the deal. Several technologies going to one recipient can be filed together. In a question-and-answer statement published alongside the announcement, a ministry spokesperson said exporters must judge for themselves whether a planned export falls within scope, and that every export of the listed solar equipment has to be registered.
Where the AI lines are drawn
The draft annex sets out specific technical thresholds. On the prohibited side are large models trained on China's "core data" and then used to provide services, a term the annex says is defined by the Data Security Law. Also proposed for a ban are AI-driven techniques for generating and mutating malicious code that could be used against critical infrastructure, defence or core government systems, with success-rate thresholds set against antivirus engines and malware detectors.
The restricted list covers the core technology of large models, including weights, key checkpoints, underlying source code and architecture, where a model meets any of three tests. One is training compute of at least 10 to the power of 26 floating-point operations. Another is at least 2 trillion parameters. The third is capability at a "globally leading level", which the annex defines as a top-10 global ranking in public evaluations of performance, usage, safety or training efficiency at the time of export. Models trained on China's "important data" also fall in the restricted group, with a narrow exemption for models that use only a trace amount, no more than 0.1%, under conditions that include safeguards so the data is not reproduced in outputs.
Agents are measured too. A planning system that breaks an instruction into 20 or more executable steps at set accuracy levels is restricted, as is a multi-agent system running 60 or more cooperating agents. Interconnect for clusters of more than 10,000 AI accelerators is restricted above 800 gigabytes per second of bidirectional bandwidth.
What stays outside the rules
Technology already in the public domain through open-source release or academic publication is excluded, according to the announcement. On selling Chinese models abroad, the spokesperson went further. Offering a restricted model through an API, an app or web interface, a software-as-a-service product or a lightweight on-device deployment does not count as exporting the model technology, the statement says. Deploying a restricted model on overseas infrastructure does, though deployment on a company's own overseas cloud may qualify for automatic licensing.
The same fast route is promised for open-sourcing AI technology, building and running computing centres abroad, chip fabrication overseas and joint research. "The vast majority of AI technologies can still be exported freely," the spokesperson said (RECATOOLS translation). Products made with the listed technologies are also outside the scope, according to the statement.
Beijing's stated reasons
The ministry describes the revision as routine. It says the catalogue has been adjusted several times since 2001 and that this round is "not aimed at any specific country, region or entity" (RECATOOLS translation). On AI, it argues that tools such as autonomous malicious-code generation could harm national and shared security if obtained by non-state actors, and says the aim is to "ensure that AI always remains under human control" (RECATOOLS translation). For solar, it cites growing use of photovoltaic technology in aerospace, defence and unmanned equipment.
Outside observers have read the move against the backdrop of US-China trade tension. Leonhard Xu, a senior consultant at the Berlin-based consultancy Sinolytics, noted that the registration duty starts immediately, and told The National that "export control does not equal an export ban in most cases", according to its report.
What happens next
Comments can be sent to MOFCOM by email, fax or letter until 15 November. The ministries have not said when a final catalogue will be published, and the thresholds above may change before then. Until the final catalogue is issued, any company in China licensing, selling or ceding control of technology in these three fields abroad has to file first. That includes deals already in progress.
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