China has proposed restricting exports of a swath of AI technology and then, within days, moved to let its two best known model makers keep selling abroad. Beijing’s Ministry of Commerce and Ministry of Science and Technology announced on October 16 a revision of the Catalogue of Technologies Prohibited and Restricted from Export, adding 23 technologies related to large scale models, intelligent agents, computing clusters and information processing. Exporting restricted technology requires registration or a government licence, technology issued under open source licences is exempt, and public comment on the draft runs to November 15.
On Friday, Chinese state media reported that two companies, named in other reporting as DeepSeek and MiniMax, had received authorisation to continue exports. Both are credible challengers to American AI vendors, and letting them sell abroad serves Beijing’s aim of building export industries in AI, while the catalogue itself gives the state a switch it can use on technology it treats as sovereign capacity, such as potent vulnerability finders or military applications.
The shape of the draft matters as much as the authorisations. Reporting on the draft says API access, software as a service and on device deployment built on restricted models fall outside export management, and that the banned category covers large models trained on China’s core data, with thresholds discussed at training compute above 10 to the power 26 operations or more than 2 trillion parameters. That is a control on shipping the technology itself, not on selling the service, which is why the champions can keep their foreign customers.
Set against the American position, the symmetry is hard to miss. Washington has barred DeepSeek from federal systems, in a Homeland Security exclusion order dated July 24 that became public last week and that Beijing formally objected to on October 20, and the United States has run on again, off again bans on advanced GPU sales to China. Both capitals are now building licensing regimes around the same stack, and both are authorising the champions they want competing abroad. The October 20 story on this site covered the US removal order; today’s development is the Chinese half of the same structure.