China's draft model export rules: open-source releases get automatic license, not a total ban
eliebakouch · x · 2026-10-16
Responding to claims that Chinese players need MOFCOM permission to open-source models trained on >10^26 FLOPS, the author argues the framing is misleading: the draft covers both open and closed models, but new open-source releases get an automatic license and already open-sourced models are out of scope — it's a proposal, not yet in force.
The attached analysis of MOFCOM/MOST Announcement No. 48 of 2026 (draft amendment to China's export control catalogue) details:
- 40 controlled items added (14 prohibited, 26 restricted); large models are item 266504X, restricted; comments open until Nov 15.
- "Core technology" covers models with ≥10^26 training FLOPS, ≥2T parameters, or top-10 world ranking (including usage volume). DeepSeek V3 and Kimi K2 trained on 3e24 FLOPS fall under the FLOPS bar, but the top-10 clause likely catches every frontier Chinese lab, judged at time of export.
- Export means technology physically leaving China: already-open models exempt; new open releases count as export with automatic license; API/own overseas cloud get automatic license; on-prem deployments and weight sales need real licenses.
- The compute cluster item covers >10k accelerators with >90% interconnect and ≤120s checkpoint recovery; DeepSeek-style infra code is in scope.
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