Regulators at China's Ministry of Commerce have consulted Alibaba, ByteDance, and Zhipu on how to keep frontier AI work within the country, covering training data export and model weight downloads by foreigners. The proposed rules would also prevent Qualcomm and TSMC from manufacturing advanced chips based on Huawei or Alibaba designs, and stop foreign acquisitions of agentic AI startups, following Meta's forced unwind of its Manus purchase.
China is imposing export controls on its AI and chip IP, creating a bifurcated global AI ecosystem where Chinese innovation is ring-fenced from Western access.