Anthropic CEO stuns Davos with Nvidia criticism

Last week, after overturning the previous ban, the US administration officially approved the sale of Nvidia’s H200 chips, along with a line of chipsets from AMD, to authorized Chinese customers. These may not be the flashiest, most advanced chips from chipmakers, but they are high-performance processors used in artificial intelligence, making exports controversial. At the World Economic Forum in Davos on Tuesday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei deflated both management and chip companies over the decision.

The criticism was particularly notable because one of the chipmakers, Nvidia, is a partner and major investor in Anthropic.

“The CEOs of these companies are saying: ‘It’s the chip ban that’s holding us back,’” Amodei said in disbelief when asked about the new rules. He warned that the decision would deal a severe blow to the United States.

“We are many years ahead of China in terms of our ability to make chips,” he told a Bloomberg editor who was interviewing him. “So I think it would be a big mistake to ship these chips.” Amodei then painted a disturbing picture of what is at stake. He spoke of the “stunning national security implications” of AI models that represent “essentially cognition, which is essentially intelligence.” He likened future AI to “a country of geniuses in the data center,” saying it was safe to imagine “100 million people smarter than any Nobel Prize winner,” all under the control of one country or another.

The photo confirmed why he believes chip exports are so important. But then came the biggest blow. “I think this is crazy,” Amodei said of the administration’s latest move. “It’s a bit like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea [bragging that] The envelopes were made by Boeing.

That sound you hear? Nvidia team, screaming into their phones.

Nvidia is not just another chip company. While Anthropic runs on Microsoft, Amazon, and Google servers, only Nvidia provides the GPUs that run Anthropic’s AI models (every cloud provider needs Nvidia GPUs). Not only is Nvidia at the center of it all, but it also recently announced that it is investing up to $10 billion in Anthropic.

Just two months ago, the two companies announced this financial relationship, along with a “deep technology partnership” with cheerful promises to improve each other’s technology. Fast forward to Davos, Amodei compares his partner to an arms dealer.

Maybe it was just an unguarded moment, and it’s possible he got carried away in his own rhetoric and blurted out the metaphor. But given Anthropic’s strong position in the AI ​​market, he likely felt comfortable speaking confidently. The company has raised billions, is valued in the hundreds of billions, and its coding assistant Claude has gained a reputation as a much-loved, top-tier AI coding tool, especially among developers working on complex, real-world projects.

It’s also possible that Anthropic really fears Chinese AI labs and wants Washington to act. If you want to get someone’s attention, nuclear proliferation analogies are probably a very effective way to do that.

But perhaps what is most striking is that Amodei could sit on stage in Davos, drop a bomb like that, and walk away to another gathering without fear of it negatively impacting his business. News cycles certainly continue. Anthropy is also on solid footing at the moment. But she feels that the AI ​​race has become so existential in the minds of its leaders that the usual constraints — investor relations, strategic partnerships, diplomatic niceties — no longer apply. Amodei isn’t worried about what he can and can’t say. More than anything else he said on that stage, courage is worth paying attention to.