Passports to the firm

China has begun requiring pre-approval before its best AI researchers, founders and engineers can leave the country, according to a Bloomberg report. The firms named are private ones — DeepSeek, Alibaba, and reportedly Moonshot AI, StepFun and ByteDance — and the regime reaches only the people judged most valuable, not all staff.

There is no formal ban — engineers are simply asked to hand their passports to their employer.

The striking part is how it is enforced. There is no court order and no public list. Instead, employers are reportedly collecting their own engineers' passports: DeepSeek's quant-fund parent, High-Flyer, was said to be holding staff passports as early as December 2025, months before any formal government requirement. It is an exit control run informally, without judicial review.

The same apparatus China built to keep nuclear-weapons scientists from defecting is the one now applied here. The hardening took about fourteen months — from a March 2025 advisory merely suggesting AI founders avoid trips to the US, to a binding pre-approval rule that applies wherever you are going. The signal underneath it is the real story: Beijing has decided the people who train its frontier models are strategic assets to be kept inside the borders, the way it once treated enriched uranium. If the global AI race is fought partly over talent, one side has just stopped letting its players walk off the field.