China has started requiring its most strategically important artificial intelligence researchers, founders and executives to obtain government approval before they travel abroad. The measure had until recently applied mainly to nuclear scientists and the leaders of state-owned enterprises. Bloomberg first reported the expansion on 26 May, and several outlets have since confirmed the broad strokes.
What makes this notable is that the controls now reach into private companies. People working on advanced AI at Alibaba and at the startup DeepSeek are among those affected, according to reporting from TechTimes and Seeking Alpha. Who gets restricted seems to depend on how valuable a person is judged to be to the country's AI ambitions, not on rank or job title.
From quiet advice to formal control
This is less a sudden decree than the hardening of guidance that has circulated for over a year. Back in early 2025, officials were reportedly encouraging prominent AI figures to steer clear of travel to the United States and to file their itineraries in advance. Approval was rarely mandatory. By May 2026 that soft nudge had become a firm rule for anyone deemed sensitive.
The shift had been visible at the company level too. DeepSeek's parent, the quantitative fund High-Flyer, is said to have begun holding some employees' passports informally in December 2025 before the practice settled into policy. One episode shows how far the controls can stretch. The co-founders of the agent startup Manus, chief executive Xiao Hong and chief scientist Ji Yichao, were reportedly barred from leaving the country during a regulatory review tied to Meta's interest in the business.
The reasoning behind it
Beijing's logic is not hard to follow. It now treats frontier AI expertise as a national security asset close in value to sensitive military technology, and it wants to keep both the people and their know-how from drifting overseas. The aim is to blunt talent poaching by foreign firms and slow the outward flow of research at a delicate moment.
That moment is really the point. Stanford's 2026 AI Index measured the performance gap between the best American and Chinese models at just 2.7 percent on the Arena leaderboard, down from somewhere between 17.5 and 31.6 percentage points in 2023. When the distance has closed that far, every senior researcher starts to look like a strategic resource worth guarding.
For the researchers themselves, the immediate cost is friction. International conferences, recruiting trips and joint work with foreign labs now run through an approval process that did not exist a year ago. The wider question is what happens to an open scientific culture when the people who built it can no longer come and go as they please. China is betting that keeping its talent home is worth that price. Whether the talent agrees is another matter.
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