US investigates China's access to RISC-V

So far this just seems like politicians having no idea what an ISA is.

China could have just rolled a variant of x86 (most of the patents are expired), or used MIPS which is open too. And anyways, designing the ISA isn't really the hard part, it's maintaining the toolchains, the kernel patches, etc, and there's no way to stop the Chinese from just downloading those. The US can't stop China from using the RISC-V ISA any more than they can stop them from using English.

Although... if the politicians do figure out how all this works, they could try passing a law banning US open source projects (eg. the Linux Foundation, based in the US) from interacting with Chinese nationals. The justification would likely be security concerns; see: that whole XZ fiasco. If they do go in that direction, all hell will break loose in the open source world.

Given that RISC-V doesn't require a license to use and the ISA is open, there is no way to enforce the U.S. government's will on the matter. China doesn't need to license designs, it can just make them if it wants to. RISC-V is also "based" in Switzerland, which is isolated enough from the U.S. that I don't see them being able to put enough pressure on even if they had an angle.