Treasury moved on October 22 to widen the Outbound Investment Security Program, the 2023-vintage screen on American capital flowing into sensitive foreign tech. A notice of proposed rulemaking would add sectors and countries of concern to a regime that until now covered three categories.
Authority for the change comes from a statute Congress folded into the fiscal 2026 defense authorization bill, the Comprehensive Outbound Investment National Security Act. The law obliges American investors to tell Treasury about certain deals involving foreign parties working on notifiable technologies, and blocks others outright.
Lawmakers framed the whole exercise around dual-use technology that can serve an adversary’s military modernization, its surveillance apparatus or its human rights abuses. The COINS Act lets the Treasury Secretary set technical parameters across five sectors and add others, which is how biotechnology enters the list.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent cast the step as hardening a program already on the books, saying the proposed regulations would stop adversaries from tapping American investment to build critical technologies that put US national security at risk.
New prohibitions land on hypersonic systems and on biotechnology, including brain-computer interfaces, biomanufacturing equipment and bioinformatics tools. Semiconductor rules stretch to radiation-hardened and photonic integrated circuits as well as high-bandwidth memory, and quantum coverage reaches algorithms and applications. The lineage runs to an August 2023 executive order naming China, Hong Kong and Macau, with a final rule in force since January 2025.
For funds and corporate venture arms, the practical effect is a wider set of deals that require filing before closing, and a shorter list that can proceed at all.
