Last week, after reversing an earlier ban, the US administration officially approved the sale of Nvidia’s H200 chips, along with a chip line from AMD, to approved Chinese customers. They may not be these chipmakers’ shiniest, most advanced chips, but they are high-performance processors used for artificial intelligence, making exports controversial. And at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Tuesday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei read on both the administration and the chip companies over the decision.
The criticism was particularly notable because one of those chipmakers, Nvidia, is a major partner and $10 billion investor in Anthropic.
“The CEOs of these companies are saying, ‘It’s the embargo on chips that’s holding us back,'” Amodei said, incredulously, in response to a question about the new rules. The decision is going to come back to bite the US, he warned.
“We are 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 would be a big mistake to send these chips.” Amodi then painted an alarming picture of what is at stake. He spoke of the “incredible national security implications” of AI models that represent “essentially cognition, which is essentially intelligence.” He compared future artificial intelligence to a “land of geniuses in a data center,” and said he envisions “100 million people smarter than any Nobel laureate,” all under the control of one country or another.
The image underscored why he believes chip exports matter so much. But then came the biggest blow. “I think it’s crazy,” Amodei said of the administration’s latest move. “It’s a bit like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea and [bragging that] Boeing made the guts.”
That sound you hear? The team at Nvidia is screaming into their phones.
Nvidia is not just another chip company. While Anthropic runs on Microsoft’s and Amazon’s and Google’s servers, Nvidia alone supplies the GPUs that power Anthropic’s AI models (every cloud provider needs Nvidia’s GPUs). Not only is Nvidia at the center of everything, but it also recently announced that it is investing in Anthropic for up to $10 billion.
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Just two months ago, the companies announced the financial relationship along with a “deep technology partnership” with cheerful promises to optimize each other’s technology. Fast forward to Davos and Amodei compares his partner to an arms dealer.
Perhaps it was just an unguarded moment – it is possible that he got carried away in his own rhetoric and obliterated the analogy. But given Anthropic’s strong position in the AI ​​market, it seems more likely that he felt comfortable speaking in confidence. The company has raised billions, is valued in the hundreds of billions, and its Claude coding assistant has developed a reputation as a well-loved and top-tier AI coding tool, especially among developers working on complex real-world projects.
It’s also entirely possible that Anthropic really fears Chinese AI labs and wants Washington to act. If you want to get someone’s attention, nuclear proliferation comparisons are probably a pretty effective way to do it.
But what is perhaps most remarkable is that Amodei could sit on the stage in Davos, drop such a bombshell and go to another gathering without fear that he was just having a negative impact on his business. News cycles continue, of course. Anthropic is also on solid footing right now. But it feels like the AI ​​race has grown so existentially in the minds of its leaders that the usual constraints — investor relations, strategic partnerships, diplomatic treats — no longer apply. Amodei is not worried about what he can and cannot say. More than anything, he said on that stage that fearlessness is worth paying attention to.