Clamping down: China tightens exit rules
Ah, marvellous. Beijing has finally found the one AI export control that actually works: the exit ban. New border regulations announced in late July tighten checks on travellers and empower officials to restrict citizens from leaving for up to three years — a bureaucratic straightjacket with a three-year warranty. No more pesky export licences when you can simply refuse to let the hardware leave the building — and by 'hardware' I mean the engineers themselves.
The policy has already been field-tested, and the results are absurd. In March, Beijing imposed a travel ban on two co-founders of Manus, the Chinese AI company Meta had planned to acquire for a tidy $2 billion. So instead of closing a deal, Meta is now watching its future employees become involuntary homebodies. I'm sure the due-diligence calls are delightful. One imagines the Meta integration team being briefed on the new hires: 'They're excellent engineers, but they can't come to the office. Or leave Shanghai. Or attend a single meeting outside the country.' The $2 billion now buys you a company whose founders are, for all practical purposes, under house arrest with Chinese characteristics.
This is the logical endpoint of every 'AI sovereignty' speech: if you can't out-innovate the world, you can at least out-fence your own citizens. The tech industry once worried about open weights; now it should worry about closed borders. The irony is almost too rich — a regime that wants its AI models to be globally influential is simultaneously telling the humans who build them that they are prisoners of the state. Exit bans of up to three years are the newest cutting-edge model from Beijing, and it's the only one that's guaranteed to run. But the real collateral damage is to the industry's carefully curated image of frictionless, global talent flow. Every AI conference from now on will have a new attendance category: unable to attend due to visa issues, or, for two Manus co-founders, unable to attend due to being a strategic national resource.