Last week, after reversing the previous ban, the US administration officially approved The sale of Nvidia’s H200 chip, along with the line of chips by AMD, to be approved by Chinese customers. Maybe they are not the shiniest chipmakers, the most advanced chips, but they are high-performance processors used for AI, making the export controversial. And at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Tuesday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei demolished in both the administration and the chip company through the decision.
The criticism comes mainly because one of the chip makers, Nvidia, is a major partner and investor in Anthropic.
“The CEO of this company said, ‘It’s the embargo on chips that keeps us coming back,'” Amodei said, incredulous, in response to questions about the new rules. The decision will come back to bite the US, he warned.
“We are many years ahead of China in terms of our ability to make chips,” he told Bloomberg’s editor-in-chief, who interviewed him. “So I think it was a mistake to send the chip.” Amodei then paints an alarming picture of what is at stake. He spoke of the “tremendous national security implications” of an AI model that represents “the essence of cognition, which is actually intelligence.” He compared future AI to a “state of genius in a data center,” saying he envisions “100 million people smarter than Nobel Prize winners,” all under the control of one country or another.
The image underscores why he thinks chip exports are so important. But then came the biggest blow. “I think it’s crazy,” Amodei said of the administration’s latest move. “It’s like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea and (saying that) Boeing made the casing.”
That sound you hear? The team at Nvidia, screaming into the phone.
Nvidia isn’t just another chip company. While Anthropic runs on Microsoft and Amazon and Google servers, Nvidia only provides the GPUs that power Anthropic’s AI models (every cloud provider needs an Nvidia GPU). Not only is Nvidia sitting at the center of it all, but it also recently announced that it is investing up to $10 billion in Anthropic.
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Just two months ago, the company disclose that financial relationshipalong with a “deep technology partnership” with excited promises to optimize each other’s technology. Fast forward to Davos, and Amodei compares his partner to an arms dealer.
Maybe it was just an unguarded moment – maybe he got swept up in his own rhetoric and objected to the analogy. But given Anthropic’s strong position in the AI market, they probably feel comfortable speaking with confidence. The company has generated billions, is worth hundreds of billions, and Claude’s coding assistant has developed a reputation as the most loved and top AI coding tool, especially among developers working on complex and real-world projects.
It’s possible that Anthropic is really afraid of Chinese AI labs and wants Washington to act. If you want to get people’s attention, comparing nuclear proliferation is probably a pretty effective way to do it.
But the most amazing thing is that Amodei can sit on the stage in Davos, drop such a bombshell, and go to another meeting without fear that he is just disrupting his business. The news cycle moves on, of course. Anthropic is also on solid footing right now. But it feels like the AI race has become so existential in the minds of its leaders that the usual constraints – investor relations, strategic partnerships, diplomatic good – no longer apply. Amodei doesn’t worry about what he can and can’t say. More than anything he said on that stage, it was his fear that was worth paying attention to.