China drafts tighter AI export controls targeting 23 technologies including open-weight models
China's commerce and science ministries published a draft update to the country's export-control catalogue that restricts 23 AI technologies, covering large-model core assets (weights, checkpoints, code, architecture, training/inference methods), agents, compute clusters and tools that can autonomously write or alter malware. Controls apply when models are trained on China's "important data," exceed thresholds (2 trillion parameters, 10^26 FLOPs) or rank in the global top 10; already public research or open-source releases are exempt and the draft fast-tracks open-weight releases with automatic licensing upon registration.