Two of China's best-known AI model developers, DeepSeek and MiniMax, have completed the registration process introduced alongside the country's proposed update to its technology export catalogue, and both have gone ahead with open-source releases and overseas licensing. The disclosure came on the evening of October 22 from Yuyuan Tantian, a social media account run by China Media Group, the state broadcaster.
The background is a draft revision of the Catalogue of Technologies Prohibited or Restricted From Export, which the Ministry of Commerce and the Ministry of Science and Technology opened for public comment on October 16. The draft adds 23 AI-related items covering large models, AI agents, computing clusters and information processing. The catalogue itself has already drawn attention. The new information is that two leading model makers have now worked through the process in practice.
Registration is not the same as a restrictive license, and the catalogue is still a consultation draft rather than a final list. According to the Ministry of Commerce, technologies that have already entered the public domain through open-source releases or academic papers are proposed to fall outside the scope of export management. AI open-sourcing, overseas data centers built and run by Chinese companies, and joint research using overseas resources would qualify for automatic licensing, which the ministry describes as close to export upon filing.
The ministry also drew a line around how models reach overseas users. Offering a restricted model through API calls, apps or web interfaces, SaaS products or lightweight on-device deployment does not count as exporting large-model technology. Local deployment of a restricted model overseas does fall under export management, although deployment on a company's own overseas cloud can use the automatic licensing route. The ministry says the great majority of AI technologies will remain freely exportable.
What the two companies have actually done since then gives the process a concrete shape. According to Huxiu, DeepSeek open-sourced its large-scale inference framework DeepInfer and a companion toolkit, deepseek-recipe, on October 20. MiniMax has set up a formal application route for overseas regions that its earlier model license had excluded, including the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom and South Korea. Under that approach the model weights stay open, but organizations in those regions need to pass a compliance review and obtain a license before deploying the models locally.
For developers, the practical message is that open weights, open code and API access are expected to continue largely as before, while local overseas deployment of the most sensitive technologies goes through a filing step. The comment period on the draft catalogue is still under way, and the final scope could change before it takes effect.
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