China's draft export catalogue would restrict or ban the export of twenty-three artificial intelligence technologies, and assigning or licensing a patent abroad is an export

2026-10-16China

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Ministry of Commerce and Ministry of Science and Technology of the People's Republic of China, Announcement No. 48 of 2026, public consultation on the revision of the Catalogue of Technologies Prohibited or Restricted from Export and interim registration of related technology exports, October 16, 2026, comments due November 15, 2026

The two ministries published a draft revision of the catalogue adding forty technologies in three fields: twenty-three in artificial intelligence, covering large models, agents, computing clusters and information processing, five in biomedicine and twelve in photovoltaics. The notice states that technology that has already entered the public domain through open-source release or academic publication is outside the scope of control. Baker McKenzie's October 18 summary of the proposal reports that the restricted large models include one meeting any of these tests: training compute of ten to the twenty-sixth power floating-point operations, two trillion parameters, or globally advanced capabilities, for example a top-ten ranking on public benchmarks; it also reports a numeric threshold for computing clusters and none for agents. From October 16, 2026 until the revised catalogue takes effect, the notice requires anyone exporting a listed technology to register first on the Ministry of Commerce's technology trade platform, including exports already begun but not completed, and it lists what counts: transfer of ownership of technology abroad, giving intellectual property assignment as the example; licensing domestic technology for use abroad, giving intellectual property licensing as the example; a change that places a domestic technology's owner or controller abroad; and anything else the ministry designates. That tracks Article 2 of the Regulations on Technology Import and Export Administration, in force since 2002, which define technology export to include assignment of a patent right, assignment of the right to apply for a patent, and patent licensing.

What it changesFor a company whose model work is done partly in China, the patent file is now an export file. An assignment from a Chinese subsidiary to a United States parent of a patent or application on a listed technology is a transfer of ownership abroad that must be registered from October 16, and once the catalogue is final a restricted item will need a license, while a prohibited item cannot be exported at all. When an assignment or license from a Chinese entity is being prepared, consider whether it covers a technology on the draft list, because the registration requirement reaches transfers that have begun but are not finished. The draft is open for comment until November 15, 2026, and the final list may differ, but the registration requirement applies now.

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Burbage Law is the practice of Jon Burbage, a registered patent attorney. 342 United States patents have issued from applications he wrote; the full list is on the Patents page. More about Jon Burbage.

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