China extends AI travel curbs from DeepSeek to other private firms

Top researchers at private Chinese AI companies are being asked to surrender passports, in a quiet expansion of the controls that began at DeepSeek earlier this year.

China is widening its informal travel restrictions on senior AI researchers, extending controls that began at DeepSeek earlier this year to a broader group of private-sector firms working at the frontier, according to a Bloomberg report on Tuesday citing people familiar with the matter.The pattern is consistent and increasingly familiar. Top engineers and researchers are being asked to surrender their passports to their employers, with the formal justification that their work could give them access to information that may be classified as a state or commercial secret.The arrangement is sometimes presented as a corporate policy and sometimes as government guidance; in practice the distinction is blurred. Bloomberg’s reporting places the move within the Communist Party’s growing classification of frontier AI as a strategic national asset.

The first publicly reported case came in March, when DeepSeek staff began surrendering passports shortly after the lab’s R1 model briefly upended assumptions about how much compute Chinese frontier labs needed to match Silicon Valley benchmarks.

The Wall Street Journal reported around the same time that Chinese authorities had begun warning top AI entrepreneurs against US travel, citing fears that researchers could leak sensitive technical information abroad, that American companies could acquire valuable IP, or that executives could be detained as diplomatic leverage.

What is new in this week’s Bloomberg account is the scope. The controls now reach further into the wider private-sector AI population, beyond DeepSeek and beyond the immediate post-R1 panic.

The travel curbs sit alongside a tightening regime on the financial side. In late April, China’s National Development and Reform Commission and several other agencies told leading AI firms, including Moonshot AI, StepFun and ByteDance, to reject US-origin capital in upcoming funding rounds unless they receive prior clearance.

Several Chinese AI startups, including Moonshot, are considering corporate reincorporation from overseas jurisdictions back into mainland China after Beijing’s blocking of Meta’s $2bn acquisition of Manus and signals that offshore-incorporated entities will face harder domestic IPO approvals. The intent is, by now, hard to misread: capital, talent and corporate domicile are all to be pulled back inside Chinese borders.

The technical case for Beijing’s urgency is on display in the public benchmarks. Stanford’s 2026 AI Index put the gap between the best US and Chinese models at 2.7%, down from 17.5 to 31.6 percentage points in mid-2023. China now files 69.7% of global AI patents, produces 23.2% of global AI publications and installs industrial robots at nine times the US rate.

AI-talent migration to the US has dropped 89% since 2017. The combination of a narrowing capability gap and a steady inward concentration of talent is the context in which the passport policy makes sense to Beijing.

The policy is not without cost. The passport requirement is, in practice, an exit ban applied informally and without judicial review, and it complicates international collaboration that has historically been a strength of Chinese academic AI work. Whether private-sector researchers will accept the trade-off remains to be tested.

The travel controls are easier to impose than to enforce, particularly as the affected population grows from a handful of DeepSeek staff to several thousand researchers across the wider Chinese AI ecosystem.

Neither DeepSeek nor Moonshot AI had commented publicly on the latest expansion by Tuesday evening Beijing time.

Story by Alina Maria Stan

Alina Maria Stan builds connections that people actually feel. As co-founder and COO of Tekpon, she turns product intuition into real moment (show all) Alina Maria Stan builds connections that people actually feel. As co-founder and COO of Tekpon, she turns product intuition into real moments of discovery, shaping how teams find and adopt SaaS every day. Since 2020, she has led Tekpon’s brand voice, media strategy, and growth plays with a clear focus on human outcomes behind every metric. Before Tekpon, Alina followed curiosity across industries and countries. She was CEO of King Casino Bonus and led affiliate and brand strategy at Extremoo Media and Fable Media in Denmark, where she learned how to build partnerships that last. Early on, she sharpened her CRM and pricing instincts at K.H. ApS, always asking why customers choose what they choose. Her approach is rooted in more than a decade of international experience and two master’s degrees, one in Sustainable Consumption from the Technical University of Munich and one in Consumer Affairs Management from Aarhus University.