- Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned at Davos that allowing Nvidia to sell AI chips to China poses serious national security risks
- Amodei compared the decision to “selling nuclear weapons to North Korea”, despite Nvidia being a major investor in his company
- The clash highlights growing industry tensions over how AI hardware should be controlled as global powers race to build advanced systems
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodi cut through the polished choreography of the World Economic Forum in Davos this week when he bluntly suggested that Nvidia, one of his own company’s biggest backers, was a ‘nuclear threat’ to geopolitics during an interview with Bloomberg.
The interview sparked immediate global uproar across technology, diplomatic and security spheres over his response to the US approval of AI chip sales to China.
The event ends a ban on the sale of high-performance AI chips to China. The US is now allowing Nvidia and AMD to resume sales of certain AI chips, including the H200 line, to pre-approved customers in China.
“I think this is crazy,” Amodei told a stunned audience during the session. “It’s a bit like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea and bragging that Boeing made the casings.” It was a particularly brave response from the head of Anthropic, a company in which the $1.5 trillion chip-making giant Nvidia has so far invested more than $10 billion.
They are powerful enough to dramatically accelerate Chinese AI capabilities in many ways, with military and security being of particular concern to Amodei. Amodei sees this as a real and immediate threat because AI models “are essentially cognition, which is essentially intelligence.”
He suggested thinking of the models powered by the chips as “100 million people smarter than any Nobel laureate,” all under the control of one country or another.
People were audibly shocked during the interview. Anthropic is one of the leading homes for advanced AI models. The Claude assistant is often known as a strong rival to ChatGPT in many ways, thanks in no small part to Nvidia’s GPUs.
Friction over China’s access to AI chips reflects a growing fault line within the tech industry. Chipmakers and cloud service providers hoping to hold onto or expand their control of the AI market are gravitating toward companies like Anthropic with geopolitical fears of authoritarians’ unfettered access to AI hardware.
Global chip war
Adding to the volatility are Nvidia’s somewhat indispensable AI training chips. Its architecture has become a model development foundation with few alternative providers, although AMD and Intel are eager to catch up. But it means that when Nvidia sells chips to China, it creates more than just new commercial rivals.
Nuclear weapons and airplanes are unusual analogies, but Amodei almost certainly chose them for that reason. Davos is where CEOs talk like they’re chewing on a technical manual and marketing guide at the same time. A straightforward and consequential projection of the future must have thrown many participants off balance.
You can dismiss Amodei and the whole debate as high-level geopolitical drama with little relevance to everyday life. But what is decided at the chip export level affects how quickly the next AI-powered feature and device comes out and what they can do.
The US Commerce Department has stated that any sales to China are subject to strict controls and that buyers are investigated for ties to military operations. But enforcement remains a murky affair, especially when front companies, joint ventures or subcontractor relationships can blur lines.
Amodi did not name China explicitly, but no one needed him. The whole discussion was a rebuke of America’s complacency in treating artificial intelligence as a neutral export commodity rather than a lever for global influence. And while Nvidia might argue that the chips being exported are less advanced, Amodei’s counter is that even slightly outdated chips can be networked at scale to produce transformative capabilities.
And as Chinese AI labs become more adept at optimizing existing hardware, the line between what’s considered for sale and what’s not is beginning to erode.
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