China Proposes Export Controls on 40 Technologies

China's ministries of commerce and science and technology on Oct. 16, 2026, proposed adding 40 technologies to the export-control catalog, 14 for prohibition and 26 for restriction. The draft covers 23 AI technologies including large language models, intelligent agents and computing clusters or chip designs, plus solar items such as polysilicon, wafers, cells, perovskite and heterojunction technologies, and biomedicine items including cell and gene therapies and small nucleic-acid drugs. Pre-export registration took effect the same day for transfers, licensing and unfinished export deals. Open-source and publicly released technologies would be exempt. Comment is open until Nov. 15. Chinese ministries said related technologies have increasingly been applied in sensitive areas and that AI risks have drawn close attention worldwide. Left-rated outlets led with trade tensions with the West and Beijing's statement the proposal targets no particular country. Right-rated outlets foregrounded U.S. rivalry, proposed bans on AI-driven malicious code generation and models trained on Chinese core data, restrictions on technologies with hacking capabilities, the September 2026 Xi-Trump AI incident channel, and last month's cyberattacks on South Korean banks involving a Chinese AI tool whose developer then limited source-code access. No outlet dispute on the 40/14/26 counts appears in the record.