China announced on Friday plans to place restrictions or outright prohibitions on exports covering roughly 40 technologies spanning the fields of artificial intelligence, semiconductor chips, and solar energy, as competition with the United States and other nations over advanced technology continues to grow.
A draft document outlining proposed revisions to the catalogue of technologies facing export bans or restrictions was put forward jointly by the Ministry of Commerce and the Ministry of Science and Technology. The commerce ministry's representative, in an official communication, described the decision as warranted and cited national security among the grounds put forward to justify it.
The proposal surfaced as talks on artificial intelligence safety, governance frameworks, and a joint alert system for AI-related incidents posing national security risks had been advancing between the two countries. A Friday release from the ministries catalogued 23 AI technologies spanning the range from large-scale models through to autonomous agents.
Trade measures led by the United States have, over recent years, placed restrictions on the flow of certain advanced technologies toward China, cutting off access to the highest-tier artificial intelligence processors and the specialised manufacturing equipment used to produce them.
Under the proposal, exports of core AI large-model technologies trained on sensitive national data would be barred, as would AI agents built for deployment in areas such as national defence and critical information infrastructure. A commerce ministry statement described the measures as aimed at reinforcing security thresholds, curbing misuse, and keeping AI systems subject to human oversight.
Shipments of AI models whose parameter counts reach two trillion or higher — along with those demonstrating certain frontier-level capabilities — face the prospect of being placed under export controls. The number of parameters a model trains on shapes the upper bound of what it can ultimately learn.
Two-trillion-parameter thresholds are met by a handful of models — Moonshot's Kimi K3 and Alibaba's Qwen 3.8-Max among them — though the proposal released on Friday stopped short of naming any of them directly.
Proposed trade restrictions would extend to a range of chip design technologies, among them architectures used in certain AI processors and memory devices. Among the entries on the list are a dozen technologies tied to solar power generation — among them processes for producing polysilicon, the foundational raw material underpinning photovoltaic supply chains — alongside five biotechnology areas covering cell and gene therapy applications.
Lian Jye Su, a chief analyst at the technology research and advisory group Omdia, described the move as a probable reaction to sovereignty-focused regulations that Western nations have been placing on artificial intelligence, robotics, telecommunications, and related technology sectors.
Anthropic received a directive from the Commerce Department in June instructing the company to block access by foreign nationals to certain advanced AI models on grounds of national security. Those restrictions were subsequently removed. An economist at Natixis noted that both trade and investment flows, along with access to technologies, are becoming increasingly divided across the globe.
