Anthropic CEO criticizes US approval of Nvidia chip sales to China at Davos

At the World Economic Forum in Davos on Tuesday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei sharply criticized the U.S. administration and chipmakers over last week’s decision to approve sales of Nvidia’s H200 chips and a chip line by AMD to approved Chinese customers. The chips, while not necessarily the makers’ most advanced, are high-performance processors used for AI and their export has been controversial.

Amodei told Bloomberg’s editor-in-chief that "The CEOs of these companies say, ‘It’s the embargo on chips that’s holding us back,’" and warned that "The decision is going to come back to bite the U.S." He added, "We are many years ahead of China in terms of our ability to make chips," and said, "So I think it would be a big mistake to ship these chips." Amodei framed the issue as a national security concern, saying AI models represent "essentially cognition, that are essentially intelligence," and likening future AI to a "country of geniuses in a data center," asking readers to imagine "100 million people smarter than any Nobel Prize winner." He called the move "crazy" and compared it to "selling nuclear weapons to North Korea and [bragging that] Boeing made the casings." The remarks were notable given Nvidia’s central role supplying GPUs that power Anthropic’s models, and the recent announcement that Nvidia would invest in Anthropic to the tune of up to $10 billion; the companies announced that financial relationship and a "deep technology partnership" two months ago.

Key Topics

Tech, Anthropic, Dario Amodei, Nvidia, Amd, World Economic Forum