China proposes export bans or licences for 40 AI, solar and biotech technologies: pre-export registration already applies, including know-how transfers to Kazakhstan

China's Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) and Ministry of Science and Technology published Joint Announcement No. 48 of 2026 on October 16, proposing to add 40 technologies in artificial intelligence, biomedicine and photovoltaics to the Catalogue of Technologies Prohibited or Restricted from Export. Fourteen would be banned outright and 26 would need an export licence. Comments are open until November 15. The catalogue itself has not been amended yet, but one part already applies: from the day of publication, anyone exporting a listed technology must register it with MOFCOM first, including deals that have started but not closed.

For Chinese companies working on data centres, AI partnerships, solar and drug localisation in Kazakhstan, this draws a new compliance line. Selling equipment, finished products or online services is mostly untouched. Handing the underlying know-how to a Kazakh partner is not: it needs registration now, a licence for restricted items once the catalogue takes effect, and banned items cannot be exported at all.

What is on the list

AI accounts for 23 items covering large models, agents, computing clusters and information processing. Proposed bans include AI-driven generation and mutation of malicious code, and large models trained on China's "core data" and offered as a service. The restricted tier is spelled out in numbers. For models trained with at least 10^26 floating-point operations, with 2 trillion or more parameters, or ranked in the global top ten by public benchmarks, the core technology is covered: weights, key checkpoints, source code, architecture, and training and inference optimisation. AI chip design is restricted where it involves features such as 14 nm or finer processes, 2.5D or 3D advanced packaging, high-speed interconnect or compute-in-memory architectures. The cluster item applies only to "large-scale" clusters of more than 10,000 accelerator cards and targets interconnect, fault-tolerance, communication-scheduling and heterogeneous-scheduling technologies. Anything already in the public domain through open source or academic papers is excluded.

Solar accounts for 12 items across polysilicon, wafers and cells, and the scope extends to key equipment that embodies those technologies. Proposed bans cover perovskite-silicon tandem cell technology on wafers of 182 mm or larger with efficiency of 30% or more; perovskite slot-die coating 1.1 metres wide or more; large-area perovskite modules of at least 1 square metre above set efficiency thresholds; cold-hydrogenation fluidised-bed processes with single-line trichlorosilane capacity of 250,000 tonnes a year or more; and wafers 70 micrometres thick or thinner. Restricted items include polysilicon engineering technology for single lines of 30,000 tonnes a year or more, and TOPCon, back-contact (XBC) and heterojunction (HJT) cell processes that meet the listed specifications.

Biomedicine accounts for five items. Proprietary cell and gene therapy and siRNA drug platforms could not be sold abroad as property, but licensing them out or using them for contract research and manufacturing falls outside the rules. Gain-of-function and related pathogen technologies would be banned. Discovery and validation of novel targets in the two therapy fields would be restricted, with automatic licences for outbound licensing deals.

How registration works

Exporters register on MOFCOM's unified business platform under its technology trade management module. Four situations are covered: transferring ownership of a technology abroad; licensing Chinese technology for use abroad; a change of the owner or controller of a technology to a foreign entity; and other cases MOFCOM specifies. The form asks for the exporter and recipient, destination country, the technology and its use, and the expected value. A MOFCOM spokesperson said exporters must judge for themselves whether a technology falls within scope, and that every export of listed solar key equipment must be registered.

What stays outside

The spokesperson drew several boundaries.

Products made with the listed technologies are not covered. Buying Chinese solar modules or AI servers to build a power plant or a data hall in Kazakhstan is not affected by this list.

Offering a restricted large model through API calls, apps or web interfaces, SaaS or lightweight on-device deployment does not count as exporting model technology. Deploying restricted technology locally abroad does, although deployment on a company's own overseas cloud can qualify for an automatic licence.

AI technology exports tied to Chinese companies building and running their own computing centres abroad, chip tape-outs overseas, joint research using foreign resources or work on international standards get automatic licences, which MOFCOM described as close to "approved on filing".

Solar is treated differently. Exports of key PV know-how usually come with exporting, installing, commissioning and upgrading a production line, the spokesperson said, and exporters doing that must obtain a technology export licence and use it to clear foreign-exchange, banking, tax and customs procedures. Solar equipment not named in the list is in principle outside the announcement.

Three points that touch Kazakhstan

The World AI Cooperation Organization. The spokesperson said China would offer more facilitation and support for technology exports needed for capacity building, technology sharing and joint rule-making among the organisation's members. Kazakhstan is a founding member: it was among the 29 countries that signed the founding agreement in Shanghai on July 16, with Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development Zhaslan Madiyev signing for Astana. Neither the announcement nor the briefing says what the facilitation will involve.

Language technology. Two new restricted items deal with language. One covers translation technology designed mainly for Chinese and China's minority languages, with thresholds of a mean opinion score of 4.8 in human evaluation, or BLEU of 35 in general use and 30 in specialised domains at 95% semantic fidelity. The other covers voiceprint recognition; one of its criteria is dedicated optimisation for minority languages or regional dialects with accuracy of 90% or more. Our inference: Kazakh is also spoken by China's ethnic Kazakh community, so if a Kazakh-language speech, translation or large-model project with a Kazakh partner receives core technology from China that meets these thresholds, registration would apply. Projects that only call an API or use open-source models are, by the spokesperson's account, outside scope. tumah has reported on a memorandum between a Chinese company and a Kazakh research institute on Kazakh speech technology and large models; the parties have not disclosed any technology transfer terms.

Solar and computing. Again our inference: building a solar plant or data centre in Kazakhstan means buying equipment and products, which the spokesperson put outside the rules. A company planning a wafer or cell factory in Kazakhstan with TOPCon or HJT processes above the thresholds would need to register the line export and commissioning, then obtain a licence once the catalogue applies; banned processes such as perovskite tandems could not be exported. On computing, if a single cluster in a project such as the Ekibastuz Data Center Valley exceeds 10,000 accelerator cards, Chinese interconnect, fault-tolerance and scheduling technology supplied to it would have to be checked against the list, while a computing centre built and run by a Chinese company itself qualifies for an automatic licence.

MOFCOM said the catalogue has been revised several times since 2001, that this round is routine technology trade management, and that it does not target any particular country, region or entity.

Questions to ask before signing

Does the contract deliver a product, a service, or the technology itself – model weights, source code, a process package, equipment drawings?

Do the technical parameters reach the listed thresholds? Is the technology already open-source or published?

Has the deal started but not closed? That still needs registration.

Is the solar equipment on the list of key and core equipment?

Does the cooperation sit within the World AI Cooperation Organization? The facilitation rules have not been published.

Sources:
MOFCOM and Ministry of Science and Technology, Announcement No. 48 of 2026 with Annexes 1 and 2 (Chinese), https://www.mofcom.gov.cn/zfxxgk/gkml/art/2026/art_ccd0391072a94c809ae7e820abe2536b.html
MOFCOM press office, spokesperson's answers on the catalogue revision (Chinese), https://www.mofcom.gov.cn/xwfb/xwfyrth/art/2026/art_d7661dbf62794345a221404f82a25959.html
South China Morning Post, https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3371149/china-mulls-new-tech-export-bans-covering-ai-biotech-and-solar-power
Global Times, https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202610/1372405.shtml
pv magazine, https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/10/16/china-proposes-ban-on-exports-of-perovskite-tandem-solar-manufacturing-technology/
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China (Chinese), https://www.mfa.gov.cn/wjdt_674879/gjldrhd_674881/202607/t20260716_11984399.shtml
Qazinform, https://qazinform.com/news/kazakhstan-becomes-founding-member-of-world-ai-cooperation-organization-96c776

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