China Open Source Daily — 2026-10-23
On 2026-10-16 MOFCOM and MOST published Announcement No. 48 of 2026, proposing 40 additions to the Catalogue of Technologies Prohibited or Restricted from Export — 23 of them AI — and simultaneously switching on a pre-export registration regime that took effect the day of publication, before any consultation had closed. Read in the original Chinese, the clause that matters is six characters long: technologies that have already entered the public domain 「通过开源、发表学术论文等方式」 are not covered. That sentence makes open sourcing a lawful exit from an export-control regime, and it is the first time a Chinese industrial-control instrument has been written with so open a back door — installed, as it happens, in the same window in which DeepSeek raised about RMB 100 billion (roughly USD 15 billion) and open-sourced DeepInfer, the production inference engine behind its own API, under Apache 2.0, with Huawei’s Ascend 950 listed alongside Nvidia SM100 on the first day. Three events, eleven days, one mechanism: the act of publishing has become the most valuable move available to a Chinese AI firm, and the state has just decided to keep the door open.