What happened
Yuyuan Tantian, a WeChat account affiliated with Chinese state broadcaster CCTV, said in a post late Thursday that DeepSeek and MiniMax had completed the registration process under the country's AI export control policy. The two companies thereby obtained open-source and overseas licensing rights.
Why it matters
China has been developing a framework governing how AI models can be taken abroad. The approval for DeepSeek and MiniMax provides some of the first concrete examples of how that framework is being applied. The decision directly affects the terms under which Chinese AI companies can distribute their open-weight models globally.
Open-source and licensing angle
The approval is particularly significant for the overseas use and distribution of open-weight models. DeepSeek and MiniMax are among the companies that release models to the open-source community, and licensing rights are essential for international developers to use them.
What remains unclear
The report relies on a social media account tied to state media rather than an official institutional statement. Details of the export control policy, which models fall under its scope and the status of other companies have not been publicly clarified.
