Free products of exact groups

Abstract

It has recently been proved that the class of unital exact C*-algebras is closed under taking reduced amalgamated free products. In particular, this implied that the class of exact discrete groups is closed under taking amalgamated free products. Here a proof is presented of a special case: that the class of exact discrete groups is closed under taking free products (with amalgamation over the identity element). The proof of this special case is considerably simpler than in full generality.