Safety & policy

China drafts tighter export rules for open-weight AI models

China's commerce and science ministries have released a draft update to its export control list, covering 23 key AI technologies. Large models face controls at 10^26 FLOPs of training compute, 2 trillion parameters or a global top-10 ranking. Tools that autonomously write or alter malware to attack critical infrastructure face a total export ban. Publishing restricted technology as open source qualifies for automatic licensing, and companies must register exports through a commerce ministry portal.

Why it matters: If you use Chinese AI models through apps, APIs or SaaS tools, the draft leaves that use untouched. It isn't yet clear how it treats foreign businesses that install the largest models on their own servers.

Source: The Decoder