China announced in October it’s going to restrict or ban exports of 40 advanced technologies spanning artificial intelligence, chips and solar power as its tech race with the United States intensifies. You can read about China’s drafted export controls, where 23 of the 40 technologies relate to artificial intelligence.
Exporting the weights of any model with 2 trillion parameters or more would need a government license, a line that already catches China’s own flagships like Moonshot’s Kimi K3 and Alibaba’s Qwen 3.8-Max. If your team builds on Chinese open-weight models to save money, that’s now a supply risk. Both countries now treat their best AI models like controlled goods, and the U.S. briefly asked Anthropic in June to keep foreign nationals off two of its own.
This was originally posted as a New Arrival in Paper Towns · The Catalog · №013, an issue of my weekly newsletter The Catalog. You can Subscribe for weekly insights, or get in touch to talk about what this means for your business.