China has begun ordering its leading private technology companies — including AI labs Moonshot AI and StepFun, plus TikTok parent ByteDance — to reject American capital in their next funding rounds unless Beijing signs off, according to reporting from Bloomberg picked up by Yahoo Finance, Investing.com and the Seoul Economic Daily on April 24-25, 2026. The instruction marks one of the most assertive Chinese moves yet to mirror Washington's outbound-investment curbs and effectively walls off the country's most valuable AI startups from US dollars.
Who issued the order
The directive is reportedly being driven by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) alongside other Chinese regulatory bodies. Companies were told to refuse US investment when raising funds unless they have explicit government approval. Per the Seoul Economic Daily, Moonshot AI is currently seeking up to $1 billion in fresh capital, while Shanghai-based StepFun is weighing a roughly $500 million Hong Kong listing — both rounds that would normally attract heavy US institutional interest.
ByteDance is also covered. Reporting indicates Chinese regulators are blocking secondary share sales to US investors without official clearance, complicating the company's long-running effort to provide liquidity to early backers.
What triggered the move
The immediate catalyst, according to multiple outlets, was Meta's acquisition of Chinese AI startup Manus in late 2025 — a deal valued at more than $2 billion that prompted Chinese authorities to bar Manus executives from leaving the country and to open an investigation into the transaction. Manus had relocated from mainland China to Singapore before being acquired, a structure regulators evidently want to make harder to repeat.
The Manus episode collided with rising anxiety inside Beijing about cutting-edge model weights, training data and talent flowing out through cap-table channels rather than export-controlled chips.
A mirror image of US policy
The restrictions echo Washington's own playbook. The US has spent the past two years tightening outbound-investment rules in AI, semiconductors and quantum computing on national security grounds. China's escalation closes the loop: where US investors face Treasury reviews to put money into Chinese AI, Chinese AI firms now face NDRC reviews to accept it.
Implications
For founders, the practical effect is a narrower investor base and longer timelines on rounds that could previously be syndicated globally. For US venture and crossover funds — many of which spent the last decade building China-tech books — it tightens an exit door that was already closing. And for the broader AI race, it formalizes a bifurcated capital market to match the bifurcated compute stack, with Moonshot, StepFun and ByteDance among the first names explicitly named in the new regime.
