When the Chinese start-up Moonshot AI in July released Kimi K3, an artificial intelligence model that rivaled some of the best systems made by American companies, it was free for anyone to download.
By making advanced A.I. models easily available, Chinese companies have turned open access into one of China’s most powerful advantages in its rivalry with the United States to shape the future of the technology.
Now Beijing is moving to tighten its grip on the global spread of the country’s top-tier A.I., proposing rules that could give the government new power to track, and potentially limit, where the systems go.
At the same time, the government sought to reassure users that the move would not stifle access to Chinese A.I., saying the vast majority of the technology would still be freely exported.
The draft rules reflect Beijing’s effort to balance two competing goals: regulate the spread of its frontier A.I. systems for strategic and security reasons while still encouraging global users to adopt Chinese software.
“It is almost like you have two voices speaking at the same time,” said Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution focusing on Chinese technology and industrial policy. “One saying, ‘We want extra control of these sensitive technologies so that they can’t hurt China’ and another voice saying, ‘We want to develop the best A.I. technology and we want to share it with rest of the world.’”
China’s Ministry of Commerce’s announcement of the draft rules last Friday threw uncertainty into an A.I. market that has come to see the availability of free Chinese A.I. models from companies like Alibaba, DeepSeek, Z.ai and Moonshot as an important alternative to services from American companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI.
The ministry said the rules would not affect Chinese models that have already been released, and overseas users could still access even the most advanced systems through apps and online services.
The Risks China Wants to Contain
If passed, the rules would require Chinese companies to obtain licenses to export the core technology behind their leading models.
They would also ban the export of A.I. that can be used to launch cyberattacks, as well as models trained on what China calls “core data.” The government broadly defines that as data that concerns national security, the welfare of Chinese citizens and the public interest. Experts say the scope includes data on the military or critical infrastructure, state secrets and other sensitive information.
The commerce ministry said the new controls were necessary to guard against abuse and malicious use and to ensure that A.I. always remains under human control.
The power of A.I. systems to escape their creators’ control and hack into real-world systems without human knowledge has drawn global scrutiny. In the United States, A.I. agents being tested by OpenAI broke into outside systems including the A.I. start-up Hugging Face, and meddled with U.S. government websites. The agents also hacked into an Australian government website and acquired health data, prompting an investigation by Australian officials.
In China, the internet giant Tencent last week acknowledged that A.I. agents it used to evaluate other companies’ models had behaved in ways it did not intend, after researchers said the agents tried to bypass anti-robot protections on websites.
China’s proposed export rules signaled that the government is concerned about the safety of increasingly sophisticated A.I. models, as calls have grown for the United States and China to prevent the technology from causing catastrophic harm. Earlier this month, the Communist Party’s Central Committee and the State Council, China’s cabinet, called for the establishment of a monitoring and emergency response system that would ensure that A.I. is “safe, reliable and controllable.”
“These controls show that China is taking the risks of powerful A.I. much more seriously than was generally understood,” said Martin Chorzempa, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
What the Rules Could Change
Still, much remains unclear, such as how strictly China will enforce the rules and how burdensome the licensing process will be, especially for labs that release updates to their models every few weeks.
One of the draft rules called for export restrictions on any “globally leading” model, which the ministry said could be partly defined as a system that ranks in the top 10 for global usage. It also set thresholds for a model’s size and how much computation was used in its training. Meeting any one of those criteria would be enough to require a license.
Analysts at Trivium China, a research and advisory firm, wrote in a note to clients that the criteria would capture future versions of Kimi, Qwen, and DeepSeek, referring to three of the most advanced Chinese models.
If adopted, the rules would also give Beijing a say over who buys Chinese A.I. companies.
That could close the regulatory loophole that briefly allowed Meta to acquire Manus, a Singapore-based A.I. company that was founded in China, earlier this year. Beijing ultimately scuttled the deal, and in an apparent effort to discourage Chinese A.I. executives from moving businesses offshore, restricted Manus executives from leaving China.
No Longer Fully Open?
Many Chinese models are open-weight, which means they are available for other developers to download and customize as they see fit. That contrasts with services like ChatGPT or Claude, which only offer access through a subscription and cannot be modified.
Once downloaded, a Chinese model could be run on a company’s own computers indefinitely, beyond the reach of anyone who might want to restrict it. Users of American A.I., on the other hand, are essentially renting access that can be taken away. That was the case in June when the Trump administration temporarily restricted foreign access to Anthropic’s Fable 5 model, citing national security risks.
Now companies outside China that rely on Chinese A.I. systems could face similar risks.
“This could make U.S. businesses more hesitant to rely on Chinese models going forward,” said Chris McGuire, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
A.I. has emerged as a point of geopolitical tension between Washington and Beijing, with U.S. agencies accusing DeepSeek and other Chinese A.I. companies of industrial-scale copying. On Monday, the Department of Homeland Security ordered the removal of DeepSeek’s tools from the technological systems of many U.S. government agencies, which China described as an act of discrimination.
A.I. as a Tool of Influence
Beijing, however, has also couched the controls in the language of international cooperation, in a nod to the soft power influence of its A.I. technology.
The government pledged to help narrow the digital divide in the world, particularly by supporting developing countries that are members of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, a group that China founded in July that includes Indonesia, Pakistan and Brazil.
“That’s potentially quite noteworthy,” said Julian Gewirtz, a former China director for the National Security Council in the Biden administration now a scholar at Columbia University. “Beijing is establishing controls while suggesting it would offer favorable treatment for cooperation through a China-backed institution.”
Lily Kuo and Berry Wang contributed reporting.
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