Astro Hacker News - China's First Frontier AI Export Controls: Mofcom Announcement No. 48

byzantinegene |next [-]

https://www.mofcom.gov.cn/xwfb/xwfyrth/art/2026/art_d7661dbf...

"Second, we encourage open source, open collaboration, and resource sharing. The Chinese government is committed to making artificial intelligence a significant driving force for promoting common prosperity and safeguarding common security. To support the construction of an open source innovation ecosystem for artificial intelligence, convenient measures such as automatic licensing will be applied to technology exports involving open source AI technologies, Chinese companies building and operating their own computing centers overseas, conducting chip fabrication overseas, utilizing overseas resources for joint research and development, and participating in the formulation of international standards, basically achieving "immediate reporting and export." Technologies that have already entered the public domain through open source or published academic papers will not be included in the export management scope, creating a favorable environment for international exchange and cooperation in artificial intelligence technology."

their official stance suggests they remain in support of open-weights

usrnm |root |parent [-]

What governments do is, generally, much more important than what they say. And what they're doing here is moving in the direction of restriction

jacquesm |root |parent |next [-]

No, what they've been doing so far is changing nothing.

What they are saying is that they won't be changing anything.

That could of course change overnight.

There are multiple aspects to this: China is cottoning on to the meaning of soft power, and besides that being a major supplier of AI related models, services and hardware further cements their place in the world economy. They may not be able to compete directly with the USA in this domain but they are able to undercut them.

Of course there are risks as well. Models produced and released into the wild for which you have not seen the training and conditioning data could have payloads that you'd rather not have. But the same thing goes for service providers in other countries as well. You can't really trust hosted inference, not to tell you the truth in so far as is was present in the training data (censorship, not inference errors) and not to leak your information.

Iolaum |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Care to substantiate that? Not that I disagree, just curious.

My (not thorougly informed) take is that they are are taking measures to have the capability of restriction but are also adding provisions so that this capability does not add friction to the current practice of enabling export of open weight models.

So to me it's like they are keeping their options open rather than leaning on one versus the other.

28304283409234 |root |parent |previous [-]

“Mind people's actions over words.“ -Zed

“Right now, your government is doing things you think only other governments do.” -Van Halen, Right Now

_fw |next |previous [-]

I understand why China wants to restrict exports of their models.

But I feel the only reason Chinese models have been able to gain such popularity is BECAUSE they are open source.

I wouldn’t trust models from China enough to use them in important work unless they were open.

Restricting any powerful Chinese model [that ranks in the global top 10] is going to make them very difficult to advocate for, and very hard for global users to adopt.

Feels like this could be the beginning of the end of the democratisation of powerful AI.

And yes, I appreciate the irony that Chinese models have been the ones enabling that democratisation!

willis936 |root |parent |next [-]

>I wouldn’t trust models from China enough to use them in important work unless they were open.

So you've inspected the weights for backdoors?

satvikpendem |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Why do they care about global usage though? This seems primarily so that they can control it for their billion plus population, they really don't need global users at all, much to our chagrin.

vintermann |root |parent |next [-]

Probably the same reason that Meta gave: it's less important to control it, and more important to prevent someone else from controlling it entirely.

vrganj |root |parent |previous [-]

Soft Power, both in the obvious and the less obvious sense.

A model is never neutral. A model is always also a way of disseminating an ideology, and it doesn't need to be lying for that to work.

Consider the question "what caused the French revolution?"

There's many ways to answer this while being technically correct. What gets prioritized, what gets omitted, that's where the ideology lives.

vkou |root |parent |previous [-]

I agree - some parts of this seem very much like a footgun.

bilbo0s |root |parent [-]

It's actually extremely smart.

Latest and greatest China is able to make is reserved for the use of businesses and entities in the Chinese market.

Everyone else gets access to models of more limited capabilities.

It's basically the US strategy. Obvious difference being only that the Chinese allow on prem hosting of the lesser models. So plus one to them I guess.

If we want to move China or the US on from the whole, "super intelligence models for me, more limited intelligence models for everyone else" strategy, then "everyone else" will have to come up with some models competitive with the latest and greatest from the US and China. Absent that, there's just no pressure to bring the US and China to the "share the wealth" table.

Unfortunately, "everyone else" coming up with a competitive model is not gonna happen anytime soon.

vkou |root |parent [-]

The pressure for them to export models is that doing so super-charges the growth of the domestic industry. Same reason why they export solar panels, instead of just hoarding all of them for domestic deployment.

swiftcoder |next |previous [-]

These rules are not new, right? They appear to match the previous guidance (restrictions on top-10 models, exemption for open-source collaboration)

tristanj |root |parent |next [-]

Yes, this happened weeks ago and was never discussed on HN.

Part of the problem is that there are too many major stories happen back-to-back nowadays, and important stories like this one never get discussed. HN only shows 30 stories on the front page, which limits discussion.

satvikpendem |root |parent |previous [-]

Correct, this news just hasn't gotten traction until now on HN it seems, as I've already seen this news on r/LocalLlama and thought it was another piece of newer news.

christkv |next |previous [-]

We really need a foundation that trains open source models. You know what like OpenAI was supposed to be.

foo42 |next |previous [-]

slightly ot, but this seems like a good place to ask, since I don't think I have the strategic-business mind to understand it all myself: What's the play here with China having supported publishing open weight models this far? I know the official line is for the good of mankind and all that, but presumably it's more strategic than that. Soft power? Commoditise your competition?

byzantinegene |root |parent |next [-]

there's alot of reasons, but one of the more commonly cited ones is that China facing chip restrictions means they lack the compute to provide the models for global usage, and making them open-weight is one of the ways to circumvent these restrictions.

realusername |root |parent |next |previous [-]

The US economy highly depends on the valuation of the tech giants whereas the Chinese economy doesn't.

Additionally, the financial and technological equilibrium which makes OpenAI or Anthropic possible is rather precarious so they are poking on it, hoping to make it fall.

possiblymaybe93 |root |parent |previous [-]

[dead]

lisa_lin93 |previous [-]

[flagged]