MOFCOM lists 14 EU firms | ByteDance-CXMT $7B memory deal | Silicon Valley pushes back on Bessent

Your morning brief on Chinese technology.

Bottom Line Up Front

MOFCOM listed 14 EU entities on its dual-use export control list on July 24, barring Chinese exporters and third-country parties from supplying named goods to them. The move is in retaliation for the EU's 21st Russia sanctions package the prior day that named 14 mainland and Hong Kong companies. CXMT signed a $7 billion contract with ByteDance for five years of DRAM supply, locking in a major domestic AI buyer ahead of the memory maker's $8.6 billion Shanghai IPO on July 27. Q1 2026 revenue grew 719% year-on-year to $7.5 billion. Nearly 200 Silicon Valley firms opposed a potential U.S. ban on Chinese open-source AI models in a joint letter, after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Washington may sanction Chinese firms conducting large-scale distillation attacks. Moonshot AI rejected the distillation claims, saying Kimi K3's gains come from architectural innovations, while Chinese analysts cast the threats as anxiety over China's AI progress.

On July 24, China's Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) named 14 European Union entities, led by Rafat Group, on its dual-use export control list, meaning goods with both civilian and military applications. Chinese exporters are barred from supplying those items to the 14 named entities, and third-country parties are barred from transferring PRC-origin goods to them. MOFCOM framed the listing as retaliation for the EU's 21st Russia sanctions package, released July 23, which named 14 mainland and Hong Kong companies. The announcement came less than 24 hours after the EU package; special-case export applications must be filed with the ministry.

Read at Yicaistate media ↗

Memory maker CXMT signs $7 billion five-year supply contract with ByteDance ahead of Shanghai IPO

CXMT (ChangXin Memory Technologies), China's largest DRAM maker, signed a five-year memory supply agreement worth more than $7 billion (about 47.5 billion yuan) with TikTok's Chinese parent ByteDance this month, per Reuters. DRAM is the working memory that data centers use to run AI training and inference workloads. The contract locks a major Chinese cloud and AI buyer into onshore supply as CXMT prepares an $8.6 billion Shanghai IPO on Monday, July 27, after Q1 2026 revenue jumped 719% year-on-year to $7.5 billion. The Pentagon has designated CXMT a Chinese military company, and a U.S. interagency committee approved it for the Entity List last year, though officials held off after Apple sought assurances against listing.

Read at ITHome ↗·Read at Investing.com ↗

Nearly 200 Silicon Valley firms co-sign letter opposing U.S. ban on Chinese open-source AI models

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on July 23 Beijing time that if Chinese firms are secretly conducting large-scale model distillation attacks on U.S. AI, amounting to intellectual property theft, the United States may sanction them or add them to the Entity List, telling Fox Business that "watermarks" of U.S. models had been found inside Chinese ones. Distillation trains a new model on outputs from an existing one to inherit its capabilities. Huang Zhenxin, head of enterprise business at Moonshot AI, rejected the claims, saying Kimi K3's gains come from architectural innovations rather than from copying existing models. Zhou Mi, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation, told the Global Times on July 22 that U.S. threats to review overseas model intellectual property reflect anxiety over China's AI progress.

Read at Caixin ↗·Read at CGTN ↗

MIIT dispatches inspectors to GAC Aion and XPeng plants, sampling vehicles and batteries for national-standard testing

On July 24, inspectors from China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), the industrial regulator that licenses vehicle producers, visited GAC Aion New Energy Automobile and XPeng's Zhaoqing plant for on-site supervisory checks. GAC Aion is the new-energy vehicle arm of state-linked automaker GAC Group; XPeng is a listed Chinese EV maker. Inspectors randomly sampled vehicles and power batteries, meaning the lithium-ion packs that store energy for an EV's drivetrain, and sent them to accredited institutions for national-standard compliance testing. The site visits followed a July 17 MIIT symposium requiring key automakers to resist "irrational competition" and strengthen safety validation for combined driver-assistance and autonomous driving features.

Read at ITHome ↗

AI & FOUNDATION MODELS

Tencent merges Hunyuan multimodal and language model teams under ex-OpenAI researcher Yao Shunyu

Tencent announced on July 23 that it merged its Hunyuan multimodal and large language model divisions into a single Foundation Model Department, led by Chief AI Scientist Yao Shunyu, per Caixin. Hunyuan is Tencent's in-house family of foundation models. Tencent said the merger is intended to improve model R&D and coordination efficiency and to explore the intelligence ceiling of fully multimodal models. The reorganization follows Tencent's July 6 release of Hunyuan Hy3 and Moonshot AI's July 16 launch of Kimi K3. 36Kr reported that Han Hu, who led Hunyuan multimodal understanding, has resigned to start his own company, and that former OpenAI researcher Yonglong Tian, who joined the large language model department in early July, will take over Hu's vision-language model work under Yao.

Read at Caixin ↗·Read at 36Kr ↗

Startup Zhongshu Ruizhi says causal-reasoning AI is running at 35 Chinese state-owned enterprises

At the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, Chinese startup Zhongshu Ruizhi released an "AI for Reasoning" causal intelligence framework and a Causal World Model Technical Blue Paper, per QbitAI. Causal intelligence systems model cause-and-effect relations between variables directly, rather than pattern matching between inputs and outputs the way most generative models do. The company reports the system is in production at more than 35 large central and provincial state-owned enterprises across oil and gas, power, manufacturing, medicine and finance, covering more than 800 core business scenarios. In oil-and-gas well-control testing disclosed in the blue paper, the company says the system advances warning windows for overflow and gas intrusion by roughly 15 to 20 minutes, locates root causes in complex conditions with about 94% accuracy and filters out more than 40% of false alarms caused by sensor drift and normal operating fluctuations.

Read at QbitAI ↗

III

ROBOTICS & AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS

EV maker XPeng begins small-batch humanoid robot production at Guangzhou factory

XPeng, a listed Chinese electric vehicle maker, has begun small-batch trial production of its IRON humanoid robot at its Guangzhou factory, with the mass production line entering final commissioning, per Sina Tech. IRON runs on XPeng's Vision-Language-Action 2.0 AI model, which converts visual input directly into motion rather than first translating images into text-based code. XPeng expects to produce more than 1,000 humanoids per month by the end of 2026, with commercial deliveries projected to begin in 2027, per South China Morning Post. Sina Tech reported that robots will progressively enter XPeng stores globally from 2027 in guide and explainer roles. CEO He Xiaopeng said in November that the company expected to sell 1 million robots by 2030.

Read at ITHome ↗·Read at South China Morning Post ↗