Chinese regulators are studying the strengthening of controls on exports of artificial intelligence and semiconductor technologies to prevent strategic advances from ending up in the hands of Western countries, today reported the Financial Times.
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21/07/2026
by
Lusa
Segundo the British newspaper, which cites sources involved in the discussions, bodies led by the Ministry of Commerce consulted some of the largest Chinese AI and semiconductor companies on ways to prevent advanced technologies and prominent emerging companies from being acquired by foreign groups.
The companies consulted include Alibaba, ByteDance and Zhipu. According to the FT, Beijing discussed with these companies possible limitations on the transfer to the outside of essential data for the training of AI models, as well as the unloading by foreign users of the weights of these models, i.e. the files containing much of the knowledge acquired during training.
The sources quoted by the newspaper indicated that China would continue to allow foreign customers access to Chinese AI models and services, but may restrict some forms of unloading, implementation or reuse of these models outside the country.
The debate arises at a time when companies such as Moonshot AI, DeepSeek and Zhipu accelerate the bet on open source models, an approach that allows users and companies to install models on their own servers and adapt them to specific needs, unlike the closed model adopted by US companies such as OpenAI or Anthropic.
The issue gained relevance after Moonshot's recent release of Kimi K3, a model whose performance rivals more advanced US systems, according to specialized comparisons.
The Trade Ministry will also have asked for opinions on possible restrictions to prevent foreign semiconductor manufacturers, including Qualcomm and TSMC, from producing advanced ‘chips’ based on projects developed by Chinese companies such as Huawei, Alibaba or ByteDance.
Another of the measures under investigation concerns the acquisition by foreign groups of Chinese technology companies, especially in the areas of AI agents.
According to France Télécom, Beijing considers that there is a regulatory gap that allowed the acquisition of Manus by Meta Platforms for USD 2,000 million (about EUR 1,750 million), an operation that the Chinese authorities subsequently sent to undo.
The new measures could be included in the next review of the Chinese catalogue of technologies whose export is prohibited or restricted.
The plans of the Chinese authorities arise after a week of intense activity in the AI sector, marked by the holding of the World Conference on Artificial Intelligence (WAIC) in Shanghai, which served as a showcase to Beijing’s ambitions in this area.
At that event, Chinese President Xi Jinping defended global governance of the “precise and effective” AI at a time when China seeks to reduce the distance from the United States despite Washington’s restrictions on the export of advanced semiconductors.