Actually I don't think espionage primarily - more cyber defense against bad actors both state and private.

How about more basic things:

From now on, every ARM processor costs $40 per chip to license. Except, of course, those made by NVidia.

or

From now on, all improvements to the reference ARM architecture will only be available in NVidia chips for the first two years. Afterwards they'll be available for licensing at the current costs.

Those are monopoly issues. And now a national security issue:

From now on, $RANDOM_EUROPEAN_COUNTRY is under embargo wrt to US intellectual property. NVidia being an US company, that includes ARM reference designs. Basically what happened to Huawei with the OS, except now it includes the CPUs too.

And I could go on...

Which is why there are distinct competition investigations going on in UK, EU and elsewhere.

I think you're overdoing the last point: there is lots of key technology licensed from US firms and no-one in the UK thinks that this is a major national security issue.

Much more likely that there is a specific issue that UK government has identified that poses a realistic problem for UK security services.

> no-one in the UK thinks that this is a major national security issue.

"says" yes... "thinks"... you don't know. I would think it if i were them.

" no-one in the UK thinks that this is a major national security issue."

Citation needed

All the more reason to dump funding into RISC-V and drop ARM. CPU architectures and instruction sets shouldn't be in the private hands.

Who owns the RISC-V IP now? There may be lots of open source projects but I don't think the IP is in the public domain, is it?

UC Berkeley.

Insofar as ISAs matter for performance, RISCV is not as good as ARMv8 since the designers are too academic, but it might be good enough.