China Expands Travel Restrictions to AI Talent at Private Tech Firms — DeepSeek, Alibaba Employees Require Government Approval to Travel Abroad

China's government has expanded overseas travel restrictions to cover senior AI researchers and engineers at private-sector technology companies including Alibaba and DeepSeek, Bloomberg reported on May 26, 2026. Employees working on advanced AI models and deemed strategically important must now obtain government approval before traveling abroad — an extension of restrictions previously applied mainly to state employees, nuclear scientists, defense researchers, and academics in sensitive programs. The move represents a formal reclassification of commercial AI talent as a strategically controlled national resource, consistent with Beijing's growing treatment of AI capabilities as a matter of national security requiring state-level protection. The specific scope of the restrictions — which seniority levels are covered, which technical roles qualify, how approval is granted — has not been officially confirmed or publicly released by the Chinese government, and the initial Bloomberg report noted that affected companies have not publicly commented. The expansion arrives as DeepSeek closes its first external funding round led by China's national Big Fund ($10B, ~$50B valuation) — formalizing DeepSeek as a state-strategic AI asset whose talent pool Beijing now explicitly controls. It also comes one week after the May 14–15 Trump-Xi summit established a formal US-China AI safety dialogue, signaling that even as diplomatic AI channels open, Beijing is simultaneously hardening its domestic controls on the people and institutions that produce its AI advantage. The travel restriction expansion is a structural complement to the funding round: the Big Fund inflows retain DeepSeek's researchers financially, while the travel restrictions ensure those researchers cannot be recruited away by international competitors.