Chinese regulators are considering tightening export controls on artificial intelligence and semiconductor technologies, as the US-China rivalry intensifies in cutting-edge AI. Regulators led by the Ministry of Commerce (MofCom) have been consulting leading domestic AI and chipmaking groups on how to prevent China’s advanced technologies and star start-ups from being acquired by the west, according to two people involved in the discussions. MofCom talked to AI companies including Alibaba, ByteDance and Zhipu on limiting the transfer of key data for the training of their models overseas, as well as allowing their model weights to be downloaded by foreign users, the people said. China would still let overseas customers access the models and services, however. China’s AI lab Moonshot last week released its Kimi K3 model that exceeded Anthropic’s flagship Opus 4.8 by most of the benchmarks, demonstrating that China has significantly narrowed its gap with the US in frontier AI.

Full report : China is weighing tightening AI and chip export controls and is consulting leading domestic AI companies, in a bid to slow advanced tech acquisitions.