Ten days after Beijing announced it would add 23 AI technologies to its export-control list, the first big names have been cleared. Chinese state media reported on Friday that DeepSeek and MiniMax had completed the new pre-export registration, and the Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) has published a Q&A spelling out what is and isn’t caught. In short: selling access to a model through an API, an app or SaaS is not a technology export. That matters for every Western product currently built on cheap Chinese models.
What MOFCOM actually announced
MOFCOM and MOST Announcement No. 48 of 2026, published on 16 October, proposes revising the Catalogue of Technologies Prohibited and Restricted from Export. It adds 40 technologies across AI, biomedicine and solar. Twenty-three of them are AI, covering large models, agents, computing clusters and information processing. In MOFCOM’s spokesperson Q&A the ministry says 14 of the 40 would be prohibited and 26 restricted. Its examples include AI-driven malicious code generation and mutation, which would be prohibited, and AI-assisted vulnerability discovery, which would be restricted.
Public comments are open from 16 October to 15 November 2026. In the meantime there is a temporary rule: before exporting any listed technology, companies must register on MOFCOM’s unified platform (ecomp.mofcom.gov.cn). Registration covers transferring ownership of technology abroad, licensing domestic technology for overseas use, and a change of owner or actual controller to a foreign entity.
The carve-outs are the story
Read the Q&A and you’ll see that most of it is about what is not controlled. Tencent News made the same point: MOFCOM explains “what isn’t managed” far more than “what is”. The main points:
- Technology already in the public domain through open source or published papers is excluded.
- Open-sourcing AI technology, Chinese companies running their own overseas computing centres, overseas chip tape-out, joint R&D using foreign resources and work on international standards get automatic licensing. MOFCOM describes this as essentially “即报即出”, meaning file and ship.
- For a restricted model, overseas localised deployment does count as a technology export. If it runs on the company’s own overseas cloud, facilitation measures such as automatic licensing can apply.
- Most importantly: using a restricted large model to provide API calls, app or web interaction, SaaS, or lightweight on-device deployment to foreign customers “does not fall within the scope of large-model technology export management”.
According to the Tencent News piece, DeepSeek and MiniMax have “smoothly completed registration” and finished open-sourcing and overseas licensing under the new framework. The Register reads it as Beijing letting its champions keep selling, while keeping the power to stop exports of anything it sees as sovereign capability, such as powerful bug-finding tools.
Meanwhile, on OpenRouter
The timing is notable because Chinese models are winning on volume right now. Aju Press, citing Caixin’s read of OpenRouter data, says total LLM usage on the platform from 19 to 25 October was 188 trillion tokens, up 14.63% week on week. DeepSeek’s V4.1-Flash-1017 topped the chart with 33.6 trillion tokens, up 801%, and V4.1 Flash came second with 18 trillion. Next were MiniMax M3.1 Flash (free) on 13.7 trillion, Zhipu’s GLM 5.3 Flash on 13.2 trillion and Tencent Hy4 Preview on 8.97 trillion. That makes all five top spots Chinese. Chinese models processed 93.54 trillion tokens (49.8%) against 22.47 trillion (11.9%) for US models, the 26th week in a row that China has led.
The usual caveat applies. OpenRouter is one router, not the whole market, and it skews towards developers who shop on price.
My take
For search and AI-answer products outside China, this is the reassuring reading. If you call DeepSeek’s API, including the search and fetch API we covered earlier this month, MOFCOM says that is not an export. If you download open weights, they are already public and excluded. The place where friction could appear is the middle ground: a Chinese lab doing a private, localised deployment of a restricted closed model for a foreign customer. That is the kind of enterprise or government deal that was already the most politically exposed.
So the risk to Western use of Chinese models still comes mainly from Washington, not Beijing. Last week’s DHS order to strip DeepSeek from federal systems is a much bigger practical constraint than anything in Announcement No. 48. And with DeepSeek fresh from a ¥100bn round and dominating OpenRouter, Beijing has every reason to keep the export pipe open. The consultation closes on 15 November, and I’ll be watching for whether the final list narrows “restricted” any further.