OFA Symposium 2025: Open Technology Impact in Uncertain Times

Geopolitical competition over technologies and their underlying infrastructures has intensified in recent years, yet its impact on international collaboration in open technology ecosystems remains under-examined. As governments increasingly frame technological capabilities as matters of digital sovereignty, do geopolitical tensions strengthen or fragment participation in such ecosystems as governments and/or enterprises seek alternatives to proprietary systems controlled by geopolitical rivals? This article examines this question through an exploratory case study on RISC-V, a royalty-free Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) that emerged as an academic project at UC Berkeley focused on building an alternative to proprietary processor designs. Now hosted by the RISC-V Foundation under the Linux Foundation, RISC-V has become a strategically significant open standard for governments and industry alike, as demand grows for specialized processors in AI, IoT, and high-performance computing. Both China and the EU are investing in RISC-V architectures as part of their industrial strategies, while US Congress members have raised concerns over Chinese involvement in RISC-V. Using a multilevel framework, this article investigates whether and how key geopolitical events and tensions have affected RISC-V's governance structures (meso level) and contributors’ incentives and behaviors (micro level). It employs a mixed-methods approach, combining (1) desk research of governance changes; (2) a quantitative analysis of the relationship between contribution patterns and both governance and geopolitical developments; and (3) semi-structured interviews with RISC-V Foundation staff and contributors from the US, China, and the EU. This analysis makes both empirical and practical contributions to discussions about the strategic significance of open standards in an era of intensifying geopolitical competition in technologies and their underlying infrastructures. Initial findings suggest that polycentric governance strategies – such as RISC-V's relocation to Switzerland – may buffer against politicization and restrictions on technological cooperation.

As generative artificial intelligence (AI) models become increasingly prevalent and released under various forms of open and permissive licenses, there is a critical need to understand how they are built and who contributes to this process. Currently, there is limited research that maps open collaboration practices across different stages of the development or reuse of models and their constituent artifacts (e.g. training datasets, software, model weights, evaluation benchmarks). Our research, therefore, aims to map and characterize open collaboration (specifically, the “collaboration on-ramps”) at different stages in the development and reuse lifecycle of open generative AI models, with a focus on open large language models (LLMs). Through qualitative interviews with 12 open LLM developers (i.e. Allen Institute for AI, EleutherAI, Cohere Labs, Hugging Face, Meta, Alibaba, the BigScience Workshop, AI Singapore, SpeakLeash, SCB 10X, Fraunhofer IAIS, and the National Library of Norway), this study presents a comprehensive cartography of collaboration practices throughout the lifecycle of open LLMs across diverse organizational contexts, from grassroots initiatives to large technology companies, and world regions. This study provides researchers, developers, business leaders, policymakers, and the wider community with empirical insights into collaboration practices, including motivations, opportunities and challenges, in the emerging open source AI community as well as practical recommendations for participation in or promotion of open source AI collaboration.