Background

The Bureau of Industry and Security has issued an order imposing a $1.7 million penalty against a U.S. company that admitted violating the Export Administration Regulations by exporting items to parties in China listed on the Entity List without the required BIS license or authorization.

The items at issue are neural recording data acquisition systems and accessories that use electrodes placed in the brains of animals to acquire data and identify and categorize spikes made by individual neurons in the brain. BIS has proposed, but not yet finalized, specific export controls on brain-computer interfaces such as these.

BIS states that the penalty (and a corresponding denial of export privileges) will be suspended for five years and waived thereafter provided that the company timely completes and submits an external audit of its export controls compliance program and commits no further export violations during that time.

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