China Lists 23 AI Technologies for Export Control

Opinion. Every figure below is sourced in the box at the end; the conclusions are the author's.

In China, the Ministry of Commerce and the Ministry of Science and Technology published notice No. 48 of 2026 on October 16. It proposes adding 40 technologies to the national catalogue of technologies whose export is prohibited or restricted. Twenty three of them are artificial intelligence: large models, AI agents, computing clusters and information processing. The same day, Taiwan's economy minister said Taipei would put AI servers and advanced chips on its own control list.

What Beijing actually published

The notice covers three fields. Artificial intelligence, 23 items. Biomedicine, 5 items: cell and gene therapy, small nucleic acid drugs, pathogenic microorganisms. Photovoltaics, 12 items: polysilicon, wafers and cell manufacturing, including the key equipment that carries the technology.

Two exemptions matter more than the list. For AI, technologies already in the public domain through open source releases or academic papers are excluded. For biomedicine, licensing deals that do not transfer ownership get facilitation measures such as automatic licensing.

The public can comment from October 16 to November 15. But the control starts now: from the date of publication until the catalogue is formally revised, any exporter must register before exporting a listed technology on the ministry's trade platform. That includes transferring ownership of intellectual property abroad, licensing it to a foreign user, or a change of owner or controller to a foreign entity. Exports already started but not completed are covered.

Taiwan moves the same week

In an interview with Bloomberg on October 12, reported by Taiwan's Central News Agency on October 16, economy minister Kung Ming hsin said Taiwan would add AI servers and advanced semiconductors to its export control list, and that shipping restricted AI hardware to China would then be prosecuted under the Foreign Trade Act. He tied it to commitments under the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade with the United States. He gave no date. CNA notes that today, unauthorized AI chip exports to China are not a crime in Taiwan.

What it means

Beijing is not locking down AI in general. It is protecting what is not yet public: closed model know how, agent systems, the engineering of computing clusters, and the solar manufacturing chain where it already dominates. What is published stays free to travel, which keeps Chinese open models spreading worldwide while the industrial secrets stay home.

Washington wrote export controls first. Beijing and Taipei are now writing their own. Brussels, meanwhile, spent the last two years writing rules for how AI must behave inside Europe, for models mostly built elsewhere.

Verdict

This is technological sovereignty in its rawest form: a list, a registration form and a ministry that wants to know who is buying. You can find it brutal. It is also what serious states do when a technology becomes strategic. Europe keeps regulating usage while others regulate ownership. The day a European champion needs a Chinese solar machine or a Taiwanese AI server, who will be filling in the form?