KoreaScience ministry runs emergency survey on China's AI export curbs: which Korean firms use DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi

South Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT ran an emergency survey on how China's AI technology export restrictions affect Korean companies. ETNews reported on Oct. 29 that the ministry polled members of the Korea Artificial Intelligence and Software Industry Association through Oct. 28 and is compiling results.

On Oct. 16 China began collecting comment on revising its list of banned and restricted export technologies to include super-large AI models above 2 trillion parameters and AI agents. A rule requiring advance registration of export region, technology and use for overseas transfers applied from the announcement day.

The survey asked about use of DeepSeek, Alibaba's Qwen, Tencent's Hunyuan and Moonshot's Kimi, deployment forms such as on-premises or API, and whether US or Korean models are used alongside. It also covers risk of development halts, limits on taking model weights out, and replacement costs. One AI company official said API and web services remain usable, but restrictions on open-source models could constrain development over time.