US investigates China's access to RISC-V — open standard instruction set may become new site of US-China chip war

The U.S. Department of Commerce is investigating the risks of China's access to the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) for processors, Reuters reports, heeding calls from lawmakers.

RISC-V (pronounced risk-five) is an ISA, a software instruction standard that tells processors how to receive instructions (e.g. x86 and ARM). RISC-V's low complexity is easier to work with than x86, and is a fully open standard — unlike Arm, its primary competitor. While not popular in mainstream computing products, the standard has a high potential for most processor use cases, concerning U.S. lawmakers attempting to limit China's access to advanced computing power in the ongoing trade war over tech.

The RISC-V standard is a fully open standard, licensable by anyone, and is currently held by a Swiss trust to keep its open standard nature intact. But this has not stopped U.S. lawmakers from calling it a U.S.-based tool and declaring China's use of it to be wrong — and perhaps dangerous.

"The CCP (Chinese Communist Party) is abusing RISC-V to get around U.S. dominance of the intellectual property needed to design chips," said Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in his first attack on China's access to RISC-V back in October.

This is not the first time the U.S. government has tried to stop China's access to RISC-V. In October, McCaul and other lawmakers called for China's access to RISC-V to be hampered, which RISC-V International was swift to push back on. Callista Redmond, chief executive of RISC-V International, responded that unhampered open standards are important: "RISC-V is an open standard and has incorporated meaningful contributions from all over the world. As a global standard, RISC-V is not controlled by any single company or country."

Open standards, such as Ethernet, HTTPS, and USB have revolutionized the internet and technology, and restricting access to any of these would have catastrophic impacts on both the embargoed entity and the success of the open-source projects that would now find their reach limited.

In November 2023, a new group of 18 lawmakers again attacked China's access to RISC-V. Yesterday, the Department of Commerce responded to their claims, stating it is now "working to review potential risks and assess whether there are appropriate actions under Commerce authorities that could effectively address any potential concerns."

The Department of Commerce also addressed RISC-V International's worries about the restriction of the open-source standard, however, noting that it would need to act carefully to "avoid harming U.S. companies that are part of international groups working on RISC-V technology."

The chip war between China and the U.S. will likely continue for as long as the U.S. fears military development or losing economic ground to their superpower competition. And while the U.S. continues attempting to ban China's access to any powerful technologies, China is not making relations easier, with a report yesterday finding that Chinese universities have been sidestepping sanctions on Nvidia GPUs.