Paranoia continues to run deep within the world of RISC-V, the open-source chip design technology that dates to 2015 and involves the latest reduced instruction set chip (RISC) designs within a movement that dates back 40 years.

The latest wrinkle comes from reports that two US Senators, Republican Marco Rubio from Florida and Democrat Mark Warner from Virginia, are urging the Biden administration to develop restrictions for American companies working within the RISC-V community. Their concern, according to a Reuters report, is that the Chinese government could take advantage of American innovation on RISC-V to develop its own chips and improve its military.

RISC-V came out of projects at UC-Berkeley, but the organization moved its headquarters to Switzerland in 2019 to avoid any potential disruption by the US government. The technology became open-sourced out of concerns that many past RISC implementations have died on the vine from their private developers' instability rather than from problems with the chip designs themselves. Founding members include Google, IBM, Lattice, Qualcomm, and Rambus.