Six days ago we covered China’s draft export rules for AI, noted that an interim pre-export registration was already in force, and left one question open: whether a new open-weight release would need government approval before it went up. We said the reporting conflicted and that we had not read the ministry’s own notice.

Today there is a partial answer, and it involves the company behind the video model we publish with.

What was reported

Yuyuan Tantian, a CCTV programme, reported that DeepSeek and MiniMax have completed the registration procedures under the interim system, and have gone on with open-source releases and overseas authorised use. Sina, Pandaily and others carried it.

On r/LocalLLaMA it arrived as “clearance grants explicit regulatory approval to continue open-sourcing model weights.”

That sentence does more than the reporting does.

Registration is not approval

The interim measure that took effect on 16 October is a registration requirement. Completing it means the companies filed what the ministry asked for. The coverage we could find describes a filing completed, not a licence granted, and we found no ministry document confirming either filing. Everything here rests on one state media report, repeated.

That is not a small distinction. A filing tells you a company is complying with a reporting rule. Approval would tell you a regulator looked at a specific release and said yes. The first has happened, according to one source. The second has not been reported by anyone.

The part that does answer last week’s question

The same coverage carries the ministry’s explanation of scope, and it is more specific than what we had on the 16th. Technologies that have already entered the public domain through open source are not covered, and providing model services overseas through an API, a web page or an app is not covered either.

Commentators reading the catalogue have described it as mostly drawing boundaries rather than restricting broadly, on the grounds that the ministry spent more words on what is exempt than on what is in.

Put that beside the filing report and the practical picture is clearer than the legal one. Two of the most prominent open-weight labs in China filed under the interim system and kept releasing. Whether a future release above the proposed threshold would need sign off is still formally unanswered, because the catalogue is still a draft with comments open until 15 November.

One report adds a training compute criterion alongside the 2 trillion parameter threshold and the global top ten ranking. We could not match it to anything official, and its dates do not line up with the rest of the coverage, so we are not treating it as part of the rule.

Our stake, once

We use MiniMax H3 under an authorization we applied for in September, and nothing in today’s news changes that. It does mean that the company we depend on has now been through this process and, as reported, is carrying on as before.

For anyone running open models at home, the reading from last week holds and is slightly firmer. Weights already published stay published. Hosted use is outside the rules. The open question is about the future, and it gets answered in the final version of the catalogue, not in a filing.

We will read that when it exists.

A daily note from our news radar. The week gets the full treatment in the DIY AI Brief every Monday.