China is considering stricter controls on exports of more advanced AI models
MofCom is in talks with Alibaba, ByteDance and Zhipu to prevent Beijing from being ‘colonised’ by the US
Chinese regulatory authorities are considering tightening export controls in the artificial intelligence and semiconductor technology sectors, as the rivalry between the United States and China in the field of AI intensifies.
According to a report in the Financial Times, the regulatory authorities led by the Ministry of Commerce in Beijing (MofCom) have consulted with the main domestic groups operating in the AI and chip manufacturing sectors on how to prevent advanced technologies and leading start-ups from China from being acquired by the West.
The MofCom has held discussions with companies in the AI sector, including Alibaba, ByteDance and Zhipu, regarding restrictions on the transfer abroad of key data required for training their models, as well as the possibility that model weights might be downloaded by foreign users. China would, however, continue to allow foreign customers to access the models and services.
Last week, the Chinese AI lab Moonshot released its model Kimi K3, which has outperformed the flagship model from Anthropic, Opus 4.8, in most benchmarks, demonstrating that China has significantly narrowed the gap with the United States in cutting-edge AI.
The leading Chinese models from Moonshot and DeepSeek are so-called ‘open-weight’ models, which allow users to download them onto their own local servers and customise them to suit their specific needs. Meanwhile, the leading US models from Anthropic and OpenAI are closed-source.
