Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei sharply criticized both the U.S. administration and major chip companies at the World Economic Forum in Davos over the decision to allow sales of Nvidia’s H200 chips to approved Chinese customers. The remarks drew particular attention given Nvidia’s role as a major partner and investor in Anthropic.
President Donald Trump said last month that the United States would allow Nvidia’s H200 processors—its second-best artificial intelligence chips—to be exported to China, while collecting a 25% fee on such sales. The move appeared to resolve a long-running debate over whether U.S. chipmakers should maintain their global edge by continuing sales to China or instead restrict exports to limit Beijing’s access to advanced AI hardware. However, last week, Chinese government officials reportedly told customs agents that Nvidia’s H200 chips are not allowed in China.
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“The CEOs of these companies say, ‘It’s the embargo on chips that’s holding us back,’” Amodei said, incredulous, in response to a question about the new rules. He warned that the decision could come back to hurt the United States.
“We are many years ahead of China in terms of our ability to make chips,” he told Bloomberg’s editor-in-chief, who was interviewing him. “So I think it would be a big mistake to ship these chips.” Amodei said. He went on to cite 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,” urging people to imagine “100 million people smarter than any Nobel Prize winner,” all under the control of one country or another.
Amodei then escalated his warning further, saying, “I think this is crazy. It’s a bit like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea and [bragging that] Boeing made the casings.”
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This is not the first time Anthropic and Nvidia have clashed over China-related issues. In May last year, Anthropic faced backlash from Nvidia after it raised concerns about “Chinese chip smuggling tactics.”
Still, Amodei’s Davos comments landed as a surprise given the deep ties between the two companies. While Anthropic operates across cloud infrastructure provided by Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, Nvidia supplies the GPUs that underpin the AI models used across those platforms. Nvidia has also recently said it plans to invest up to $10 billion in Anthropic.
Just two months ago, the companies announced that financial relationship along with what was described as a “deep technology partnership.” TechCrunch noted that Amodei’s remarks suggest the AI race has grown “so existential in the minds of its leaders that the usual constraints — investor relations, strategic partnerships, diplomatic niceties — don’t apply anymore.”