China's First Frontier AI Export Controls: Mofcom Announcement No. 48

China’s Ministry of Commerce and Ministry of Science and Technology issued Announcement No. 48 of 2026 on October 16, 2026. The announcement proposes adding 40 technologies to the Catalogue of Technologies Prohibited or Restricted from Export, 23 of which are in artificial intelligence. An interim pre-export registration requirement is already in effect. Model weights are restricted at frontier scale if a model meets at least 10^26 FLOPs of training compute, at least 2 trillion parameters, or a global top-10 position on public evaluation rankings at the time of export.