‘…like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea’: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on Trump administration approving sale of Nvidia’s H200 chips to China

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has criticised world’s largest chip maker Nvidia and the US administration that recently approved the sale of H200 chips from Nvidia and chips from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) for sale to customers in China. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week, Amodei said “I think this is crazy”, adding “It’s a bit like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea and [bragging that] Boeing made the casings.”The US administration recently reversed its previous ban on sale of high performance chips like Nvidia’s H200 to China. Responding to a question about the new rules asked by Bloomberg’s editor-in-chief, Dario Amodei said “The CEOs of these companies say, ‘It’s the embargo on chips that’s holding us back”, further warning that the decision is going to come back to bite the US.He continued saying “We are many years ahead of China in terms of our ability to make chips. So I think it would be a big mistake to ship these chips.” Amodei also talked about the “incredible national security implications” of AI models that represent “essentially cognition, that are essentially intelligence.” He likened future AI to a “country of geniuses in a data center,” saying to imagine “100 million people smarter than any Nobel Prize winner,” all under the control of one country or another.Dario Amodei’s recent comments have drawn attention to the company’s relationships with its partners. In November last year, Nvidia and Microsoft announced a partnership with AI startup Anthropic that included a planned investment of up to $15 billion in the company.Anthropic currently runs its AI systems on cloud infrastructure provided by Microsoft, Amazon and Google. Nvidia supplies the graphics processing units (GPUs) that power Anthropic’s AI models.Industry watchers say a deeper technology partnership between Anthropic and Microsoft could face strain following these remarks. The comments could also affect how Anthropic is viewed by US policymakers.