Warner Pushes Trump Administration to Address U.S. Companies Enabling PRC Technology Advances

WASHINGTON - Today, U.S. Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-VA), Vice Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, wrote to Jeffrey Kessler, Under Secretary of Commerce for Industry and Security, urging the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) - which administers the nation's export controls - to address threats to technology ecosystems posed by U.S. companies engaged in close collaboration with national champions of the People's Republic of China, including companies on BIS's Entity List.

"I write to express concerns with developments in critical open source ecosystems and standards development organizations - in particular, the extent to which U.S. firms may inadvertently be ceding U.S. technology advantages to firms based in, or subject to the influence and control of, the People's Republic of China (PRC), in ways that create durable strategic advantage to the PRC," Sen. Warner wrote.

While Sen. Warner emphasized the importance of open source innovation - and open scientific collaboration - he distinguished those pursuits (which BIS has historically interpreted export controls to be inapplicable to) from the growing prominence of membership-based, corporate-led organizations that increasingly drive technical standards in a number of strategically-relevant technology ecosystems. For instance, while the open chip architecture known as "RISC-V" began as an American academic project - and grew into a collaboration with leading U.S. and Western companies mutually pursuing more open licensing models for chip IP-in recent years the project has embraced leading PRC national champions, with PRC firms comprising nearly half of the now-Swiss-based governing foundation's board of directors, including governance roles for Entity Listed PRC firms such as Phytium and Huawei.

In recent years, PRC leadership has touted open source ecosystems have key counter-weights to U.S. technology influence, allowing PRC firms to circumvent U.S. and multilateral technology controls and more-directly shape global technology ecosystems. In particular, Reuters reported in March of this year that the PRC has identified RISC-V as a key vector to break U.S. chip dominance.

Sen. Warner noted that this dynamic has increasingly appeared across the technology stack for advanced compute and AI - with corporate-led, membership-based standards development organizations like the PyTorch Foundation and Ultra Ethernet Consortium opening up to PRC national champions, including in governance roles. He highlighted the irony of American firms "cultivating open source and open standard approaches in order to avoid paying license fees to, or reduce dependence on, other U.S. or allied countries' firms" - which has inadvertently "catalyzed the conditions for PRC breakthroughs."

"While the participation of PRC firms in open source communities or open-membership standards organization may be unavoidable given global information and communications technology supply chains," Sen. Warner noted, "American policymakers have - on a bipartisan basis and spanning administrations - sought to combat efforts by PRC companies to shape and control such organizations in ways that challenge U.S. economic and national security interests."

Sen. Warner emphasized that open source ecosystems often redound to the benefit of the United States and global well-being - with open source innovation driving technology ecosystems in internet communications and computing, as well as positioning U.S. firms for long-term technology leadership and influence - and he encouraged BIS to maintain its policy of interpreting the Export Administration Regulations to be inapplicable to most open source technologies. However, in contexts in which corporate-led membership organizations invoke open source in name only - and more closely resemble economic cartels that feature PRC companies-of-concern in governance roles - Sen. Warner encouraged BIS to utilize its deemed export authority to limit the extent to which U.S. firms may be contributing towards PRC technology advances.

Read the full letter here.

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