DeepSeek and MiniMax Group Inc have completed China's new AI export registration process and proceeded with open-source releases and overseas licensing activities, according to Yuyuan Tantian, a social media account affiliated with China Central Television, which disclosed the information on the evening of October 221,3.
The registration followed 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 165. The draft adds 23 AI-related items covering large models, AI agents, computing clusters and information processing. The proposed restrictions raised concerns that overseas access to China's most advanced models could be curtailed, potentially slowing an international surge in adoption driven by cost-effective Chinese open-source AI.
What the registration permits
The Yuyuan Tantian post stated that DeepSeek and MiniMax Group Inc have completed the registration process as well as the procedures for open-sourcing and authorizing overseas use, and that AI companies can continue their commercialization efforts as usual. Much of Chinese AI will remain free for export, the post said. 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 says offering a restricted model through API calls, apps, web interfaces, SaaS products or lightweight on-device deployment does not count as exporting large-model technology. Local deployment of a restricted model overseas falls under export management, although deployment on a company's own overseas cloud can use the automatic licensing route.
MiniMax opens new licensing path
MiniMax Group Inc 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 MiniMax Group Inc's 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. Separately, DeepSeek open-sourced its large-scale inference framework DeepInfer and a companion toolkit, deepseek-recipe, on October 20, according to Huxiu.
Bloomberg confirmed that both companies won approval for global use, citing state media6. Pandaily reported that DeepSeek and MiniMax Group Inc completed AI export registration and moved ahead with overseas licensing. The catalogue remains a consultation draft rather than a final list, and the comment period is still under way.
ANALYSIS The speed with which both companies cleared the registration process, days after the draft proposal surfaced, narrows the window of regulatory uncertainty that had hung over Chinese AI exports. The carve-outs for API access, SaaS delivery and previously open-sourced weights leave the most common channels for overseas adoption intact, while local deployment of restricted models becomes the primary friction point under the proposed framework.