On 16 October 2026, China’s Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) and Ministry of Science and Technology issued Announcement No. 48 of 2026, seeking public comment on a revision to the Catalogue of Technologies Prohibited or Restricted from Export. The proposal would add 40 technologies across three fields — artificial intelligence, biopharma and solar — of which 23 are AI-related, covering large models, AI agents, computing clusters and information processing. For AI companies that already deliver models, algorithms or system capabilities outside China, the operative sentence is not the word “proposed” in the title; it is the separate section in the same document providing that pre-export registration starts immediately.
What the announcement contains
Three things sit in one document.
First, the proposed scope. Alongside the 23 AI items, five relate to biopharma and twelve to solar, with the solar section expressly extending to key and core equipment that carries the relevant technology. For AI, the announcement sets out an important carve-out: technologies that have already entered the public domain through open-sourcing or academic publication are not covered. For biopharma, outbound licensing arrangements that do not involve a transfer of ownership benefit from expedited measures such as automatic licensing.
Second, the comment process. The window runs from 16 October to 15 November 2026, and comments may address the scope of the added technologies, their indicators, control policies and facilitation measures. In practice, this is the only formal opportunity for a company to argue that a particular item has been mischaracterised or that a threshold is set at the wrong level.
Third, pre-export registration. From the date of publication until the revised catalogue formally takes effect, exporters must register with MOFCOM’s unified technology trade platform before exporting any technology listed in the annex. Exports already begun but not yet completed fall within the registration scope.
“Still in draft” does not mean “wait and see”
This is where companies most often misread the position. The announcement places the consultation and the interim registration duty in the same instrument: the catalogue is still being revised, but the registration obligation is already in force. For a company delivering model capabilities to an overseas customer, or deploying inference services abroad, the test is not whether the catalogue is final — it is whether the technology falls within the annex.
Registration is an information filing, not a licence. It requires basic details of the exporter and the recipient, the destination country or region, the technology to be exported and its intended use, and the estimated value. Multiple technologies exported to the same recipient at one time may be filed together. Filing is not approval; but not filing leaves a procedural gap that will surface when the formal catalogue takes effect, when a licence application is reviewed, or in any later audit.
Four triggers, four familiar transactions
The announcement lists four situations requiring registration, and each maps onto something AI companies routinely do.
A transfer of technology ownership abroad — for example, an assignment of intellectual property. Transferring rights in a training framework or model weights to an offshore entity, or contributing technology as consideration in an overseas acquisition, falls here.
A licence for the use of domestic technology outside China — for example, an IP licence. This is the most common case: model licensing, algorithm licences, cross-border SDK or API authorisations, and technical cooperation with overseas channel partners. Whenever the licence chain points to use outside China, the technology needs to be checked against the annex first.
A change in the owner or actual controller of domestic technology to an overseas entity. This is particularly relevant to red-chip restructurings, offshore financings and overseas holding structures. The technology itself does not move, but the rights holder becomes an offshore entity — which triggers registration all the same. Deals at this stage tend to focus on foreign investment review and data compliance, and the technology export layer is easily missed.
Other situations that MOFCOM specifies by notice. This catch-all is a reminder that self-assessment against the catalogue is not the whole analysis; individual requirements from the regulator also count.
Open source is not a blanket exemption
The public-domain carve-out deserves a literal reading. What it exempts is the portion of technology that has entered the public domain through open-sourcing or publication — not the entirety of the capability a company has built around it.
Take a large model. Published papers may describe the training method; an open repository may release an inference framework. Those parts may well be in the public domain. But what a company actually delivers usually also includes undisclosed data processing pipelines, distillation and alignment methods, the engineering implementation of distributed training, and the surrounding toolchain and tuning know-how. A technology inventory therefore needs to be broken down to that level of granularity and checked item by item against the annex, rather than closed with the sentence “we open-sourced it”.
Where the carve-out does apply, keep the evidence: the licence and release records of the repository, the publication date and public version of the paper, and a note on the provenance of the technology. The exemption is a conclusion; evidence is its precondition.
Two separate regimes from data export
Technology export and data export are frequently discussed together, but they run on parallel tracks. Technology export governs the cross-border transfer and licensing of the technology itself, under the Foreign Trade Law and the technology import and export regulations. Data export governs the cross-border provision of personal information and important data under the data security and personal information protection regime. A single project can trigger both: deploying a model on an overseas server involves a technology export filing and may also require a security assessment, standard contract or certification for data export.
The filing standards, regulators and timelines differ, and the conclusion under one regime cannot substitute for the other. For the data-export route, see our Q&A on data export compliance; for the technology-export assessment, see export controls.
Three things to do now
First, run a technology inventory. For each product or project, list the technology elements actually delivered to the overseas party, noting whether they are open-sourced, protected by patents or trade secrets, or include supporting engineering capability, then check each against the annex. The result determines whether registration is needed and where a future licence application would start.
Second, put the filing duty into contracts. Cross-border licensing, joint development and overseas distribution agreements should allocate who files, by when, and what happens if they do not, backed by representations that the counterparty will not divert the technology to other uses or re-transfer it. For contracts already performing, a supplemental agreement can set out the transition. See commercial contracts.
Third, manage transaction timing. Where a deal involves an offshore restructuring, a change of control or a technology contribution in kind, assess the registration and licensing timeline at the design stage rather than at closing. For cross-border structuring, see multi-jurisdiction compliance; for overseas IP positioning, see overseas IP.
Companies facing both the Chinese and the US technology control regimes need the two sets of rules compared side by side; our analysis of the US AI diffusion rule covers the American side.
This article is based on publicly available information from MOFCOM and MOST Announcement No. 48 of 2026. It is provided for general information only and does not constitute legal advice. The scope, indicators and control measures of the proposed technologies will be determined by the formally issued catalogue, and registration requirements are subject to the latest guidance on MOFCOM’s unified technology trade platform.