Beijing Drafts Export Controls on Frontier AI Models and Chip IP

Great-power technology embargoes seldom flow only one way. In 1949 the U.S-led CoCom placed semiconductors on its restricted list to contain Soviet power; by the 1980s Japan responded with its own protection of 1-megabit DRAM know-how. China’s mooted AI controls echo that arc: a move from import dependence to treating indigenous algorithms and chip architectures as strategic materiel. They underscore a long-running trend toward techno-mercantilism, where data, compute and IP join oil and steel as levers of state power. Whether the rules take effect or remain bargaining chips in the U.S.–China export-control chess match, they mark another brick in a 21st-century digital Berlin Wall whose contours could shape innovation, trade, and security competition well into the 2100s.