Expect US Export Control 'Crackdown' on Open Source Tech, Consultant Says
The U.S. is likely to soon try to place export controls around open-source technologies, including technologies related to semiconductors and artificial intleligence, a geopolitical risk management consultant said.
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Ansgar Baums, a senior adviser with Berlin-based consultancy Sinolytics and a non-residential senior fellow at the Stimson Center, said those export controls appear to have support in Washington. The House Select Committee on China last year called on the Biden administration to prevent U.S. technology and expertise from being shared with Chinese counterparts during standards discussions around RISC-V, an open-source semiconductor architecture that policymakers fear China will use to evade export controls (see 2407230010 and 2401230058). And the Commerce Department previously requested public feedback on the risks, benefits and potential policy actions it should take to address advanced AI models with widely available model weights (see 2402220025).
“So I think it's imminent that you will see a crackdown, that open source will be factored in the geotech statecraft, and that there will be controls around open source,” Baums said during an event this week hosted by the Stimson Center.
Baums noted that RISC-V doesn’t fall under traditional export controls “because it's not IP.” But he said the U.S. could go after the architecture the same way it targeted Huawei -- by placing Chinese contributors to the RISC-V architecture on the Entity List.
He compared it to the chilling effect Huawei’s Entity Listing had on U.S. companies in recent years that sought to participate in international standards bodies in which Huawei was a member. American companies at the time told the Bureau of Industry and Security that they feared sharing information in those bodies risked violated U.S. export controls, and they eventually successfully lobbied BIS for a standards-body exemption (see 2407170025 and 2406180014).
“So taking that example and applying it to open source means the easiest way to basically disrupt open source projects is putting the major contributors in these open source projects from a Chinese side on an Entity List, and you basically block any U.S. company from actually doing anything there,” Baums said. He added that it’s “pretty easy to do, actually.”
Baums said such a move could disrupt a broad range of users of open-source technologies, and industry should be taking the threat of export controls here “more seriously.”
“I think that's a reality that the open source community urgently needs to deal with,” he said. “It's a very imminent threat, and it can be really disruptive.”
Both Baums and Nicholas Butts, director of global cybersecurity and AI policy at Microsoft, also warned that extensive U.S. export controls will hurt U.S. technology competitiveness in the long run, particularly toward China. Butts said technology companies use the revenue earned from their sales to reinvest in innovation, which has allowed the U.S. to maintain its technological lead over the rest of the world. Restricting exports also incentivizes China to more quickly develop its own advanced technologies, they said.
“And so for us, it's sort of double damaging,” Butts said. “You have encouraged Chinese innovation, and you have hurt U.S. R&D.”
The reason the U.S. has a technological lead is due to “things like open immigration, huge access to talent and capital, free flowing ideas and being able to challenge those ideas,” he said. “And so if the U.S. focused less on trying to trip up China and more on just doing what we do, which is great, we would win in the long term.”
Baums agreed, saying the idea of introducing export controls to win a technology competition with China is “completely contradictory.”
“This is where I'm frustrated, because you can get that feedback anytime when you talk to the technologists in U.S. companies,” he said. “They will all tell you the story, but they're not part of the discussion, and that’s frustrating.”
Baums also criticized the Biden administration’s small-yard high-fence approach to export controls -- the idea of placing strict licensing rules around a small portion of advanced technologies. “We see that as fundamentally misunderstanding how technology works,” he said, adding that the yard is always expanding and there will always be “lot of holes” in the fence where companies can evade licensing restrictions.