DeepSeek and MiniMax have completed China's new AI export registration and obtained open-source and overseas licensing rights, Yuyuan Tantian, a WeChat account affiliated with state broadcaster CCTV, said in a post late last Thursday. The claim is Beijing's first signal of how the export controls it proposed on October 16 will work in practice, and it amounts to reassurance: most AI technology, the post said, will stay free to export, and the two companies can keep selling abroad.
The underlying rules, drafted by the commerce and science ministries, would add 23 AI technologies to China's export-control list, including large models, agents and computing clusters. The post set out three target areas. The first is data: a ban on exporting large models trained on China's "core data," and restrictions on those trained on "important data" regardless of size. The second is sensitive use, with bans on agents built mainly for critical infrastructure, defence or core government work. The third is computing power, covering AI chip design and the high-speed links used to wire large clusters together.
Crucially for the companies, the controls carve out their main businesses. Offering a restricted model through API calls, apps, web pages or lightweight local deployment does not count as a technology export, the post said, so "AI companies can continue with their commercialization efforts as usual." Open-source technology gets what the account called "immediate reporting and export," or automatic licensing. Reuters reported that DeepSeek and MiniMax did not immediately respond to requests for comment, and the news outlet TNW said it had not independently verified the state account's post.
The move reads as Beijing threading a needle. The draft catalogue sets quantitative triggers for a "large model," training compute above 10^26 floating-point operations, more than 2 trillion parameters, or a place in the global top ten, thresholds that capture China's frontier labs. Yet the same framework hands those labs a fast track if their weights are open, a direct subsidy to the open-weight strategy that has driven Chinese models to the top of usage charts abroad. The post explicitly contrasted this with Washington's approach, citing the US Commerce Department's January 2025 "AI diffusion" framework and an "alliance strategy" it attributed to Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei, before concluding: "China did not take this path."
That contrast is the real story. As AI Daily reported when the curbs were first proposed, the two superpowers are now building rival blocs: a US-led grouping the Trump administration calls Pax Silica, open only to the "trusted," and a China-led World AI Cooperation Organization with 29 founding members. By licensing open-weight exports rather than restricting them, Beijing is positioning openness and low cost as its pitch to the swing countries, Kazakhstan, Indonesia, Singapore and others, that are hedging between the two camps. DeepSeek, which reportedly raised $15 billion from Tencent and CATL this week, and MiniMax are the first concrete proof of how that pitch will be administered.
Much remains unsettled. Public comments on the draft close November 15, and lawyers who took part in the consultations said some control points had already shifted between drafts. Restricted technologies can still go abroad with a licence, one said, which "would not disrupt companies' overseas plans," but the line between a routine API offering and a controlled "technology export" will be tested case by case once the rules are final.