Michael Darius Eastwood · Independent AI alignment researcher
Published
The June 2026 Taiwanese proposals convert what was previously an administrative export-licensing regime into a criminal one for a specified class of advanced logic chips (leading-edge nodes, high-bandwidth memory, advanced packaging outputs). Under the current regime, an unlicensed shipment is a licensing violation, punished by fines. Under the drafts, it is a criminal offence with individual liability that can attach to executives who authorised or knowingly permitted the shipment. The penalties are proportionate to the strategic value of the chips, not the invoice value.
Administrative fines are priced into business models. A shipment worth billions in end-market value, licensed in the low tens of millions of fines if intercepted, is close to a positive expected value for a firm willing to lose one shipment in ten. Criminal liability, especially for individuals, changes the incentive structure. The signal is not "please do not do this"; it is "we intend to prosecute humans who do this."
The obvious rationale is smuggling: preventing chips destined for licensed customers being redirected to unlicensed ones via shell companies and paper trails. That rationale is real but does not exhaust the policy. Three other motives sit inside the drafts.
First, TSMC and Taiwan's downstream ecosystem depend on their reliability as a partner to the US allied bloc. A perceived leak, even one the government did not cause, damages that reputation. Criminal liability inside Taiwan is a self-binding move: it tells allies that Taipei is willing to pay a real domestic political cost to enforce shared rules.
Second, the drafts change the domestic legal geography for foreign requests. Once a violation is criminal, foreign law-enforcement cooperation becomes easier, extradition treaties become relevant, and the mutual legal-assistance path becomes available. Administrative violations do not enjoy those.
Third, the drafts extend the state's leverage over foreign subsidiaries of Taiwanese firms operating in mainland China. An individual director based in Suzhou can now, under the drafts, face criminal exposure in Taipei. That is a very deliberate incentive design.
The mens rea threshold. The exports covered. The interaction with existing bilateral licensing regimes. Whether the drafts survive contact with a legislative process that has, historically, been friendlier to the semiconductor industry than to national-security hawks. This is a proposal, not a statute. It is included here as a candidate convergence, not as a headline entry, precisely because it has not yet been enacted.
Taiwan is the fabricator. The US is the designer and the export-control principal. Europe is the sovereignty-seeker. China is the demand shock. Every one of those actors has, in 2026, moved to make control of the compute substrate a matter of first-order state policy. That structural pattern is what the ARC/Eden convergence register tracks. The Taiwanese criminal-liability proposals are one more data point in the same pattern. Convergence, not causation.
From the book Infinite Architects: Intelligence, Recursion, and the Creation of Everything by Michael Darius Eastwood.