The move is apparently seen as a way of forcing dependence on US chips while at the same time preventing the development of a technology which could rival them.

RISC-V can be used as a key ingredient for anything from a smartphone chip to advanced processors for artificial intelligence.

Some lawmakers - including two Republican House of Representatives committee chairmen, Republican Senator Marco Rubio and Democratic Senator Mark Warner - are urging Biden's administration to take action regarding RISC-V, citing national security grounds.

The argument the “lobbied” lawmakers is using is that Beijing is exploiting a culture of open collaboration among American companies to advance its own semiconductor industry, which could erode the current U.S. lead in the chip field and help China modernise its military.

Representative Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement to Reuters that the Chinese Communist Party is abusing RISC-V to get around US dominance of the intellectual property needed to design chips. US persons should not be supporting a PRC tech transfer strategy that serves to degrade U.S. export control laws.

Executives from China's Huawei Technologies have embraced RISC-V as a pillar of that nation's progress in developing its own chips. But the United States and its allies also have jumped on the technology, with chip giant Qualcomm working with a group of European automotive firms on RISC-V chips and Alphabet's Google said it will make Android, the world's most popular mobile operating system, work on RISC-V chips...

Jack Kang, vice president of business development at SiFive, a Santa Clara, California-based startup using RISC-V, said potential U.S. government restrictions on American companies regarding RISC-V would be a "tremendous tragedy." "It would be like banning us from working on the internet," Kang said.

"It would be a huge mistake in terms of technology, leadership, innovation and companies and jobs that are being created."