Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei publicly criticized the U.S. administration and chip manufacturers on Tuesday at the World Economic Forum in Davos for approving the sale of Nvidia H200 chips and AMD chip lines to Chinese customers.
The U.S. administration reversed an earlier ban last week, approving high-performance AI chip sales. Nvidia is a significant investor in Anthropic, having announced up to a $10 billion investment two months prior, alongside a technology partnership to optimize their respective technologies.
Amodei expressed incredulity regarding the decision. He stated that the U.S. maintains a multi-year lead over China in chip manufacturing capabilities. Amodei warned of “incredible national security implications” associated with AI models that represent cognition and intelligence, likening future AI to a “country of geniuses in a data center” controlled by a single nation. He compared the chip sales to “selling nuclear weapons to North Korea” while promoting the casing manufacturer.
Anthropic, which operates on Microsoft, Amazon, and Google servers and relies on Nvidia GPUs to power its AI models, has secured billions in funding and holds a valuation in the hundreds of billions. Its Claude coding assistant is recognized as a top-tier AI coding tool for complex, real-world projects.
