China's Ministry of Commerce Announcement No. 48 plans to include 23 AI technologies in export controls

China's Ministry of Commerce and Ministry of Science and Technology issued Announcement No. 48 on October 16, 2026, proposing to add 40 technologies to the Catalog of Technologies Prohibited or Restricted from Export in China, of which 23 are artificial intelligence, while the already-effective pre-export registration requirement covers exports that have begun but not been completed. The draft sets three thresholds for frontier model weights, and meeting any one triggers restrictions: training compute of no less than 10^26 FLOPs, parameter count of no less than 2 trillion, or ranking in the global top ten at the time of export on indicators such as public benchmark rankings and global call volume; agents are separately restricted based on behavioral indicators such as planning, multi-agent collaboration, and tool calling, and high-performance agents intended for critical infrastructure, national defense, or core government uses are directly prohibited from export. The public comment period for the new catalog additions runs until November 15, 2026, while the registration requirement has already taken immediate effect.