Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, just delivered the strongest public warning yet from an AI company leader about exporting advanced chips to China. And he didn't mince words.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Amodei criticized the U.S. administration's decision to approve exports of NVIDIA's H200 chips to China. He called the decision "crazy" and compared it to "selling nuclear weapons to North Korea and bragging that Boeing made the casings."
That's about as diplomatic as saying "this is catastrophically stupid."
Amodei pushed back on chipmakers' arguments that export restrictions are holding back American AI development: "The CEOs of these companies say, 'It's the embargo on chips that's holding us back.'" He clearly doesn't buy it, pointing out that America already has a massive technological lead.
His core argument: future advanced AI models will represent "essentially cognition, essentially intelligence"—like "a country of geniuses in a data center." If you accept that framing, then yes, exporting the chips that enable those models starts to look like a strategic blunder.
Here's what makes this particularly striking: NVIDIA is both a major supplier to Anthropic and a significant investor, having recently committed up to $10 billion in funding. Amodei just publicly called his supplier and investor's business strategy "crazy" on a global stage.
That's not a casual comment. That's someone with actual technical credibility saying "this is a national security threat" and being willing to burn bridges to say it.
I'm generally skeptical of AI doomers who think every model is an existential risk. But Amodei isn't a random Twitter personality—he helped build GPT-3 at OpenAI before founding Anthropic. He knows exactly what these systems can do, and he's clearly worried about what happens when adversarial nations get access to the compute needed to build them.
The counterargument, of course, is that China will just build their own chips. Export restrictions might slow them down, but they won't stop development entirely. Chipmakers argue they're losing market share to Chinese competitors for no security gain.
Amodei's response seems to be: even if that's true, why make it easier?
The H200 is NVIDIA's latest high-end AI chip, purpose-built for training and inference on large models. It's not a consumer GPU. It's specifically designed for the kind of workloads that Amodei thinks are strategically dangerous.
Whether you agree with his framing or not, it's notable that someone this deep in the industry is making this argument this publicly. Most AI executives dance around geopolitics. Amodei just compared a White House-approved export policy to arming a hostile nuclear state.
The technology is real. The risks might be too. And the decision to export cutting-edge AI infrastructure to adversarial governments is being made by people optimizing for short-term revenue, not long-term security.
Amodei clearly thinks that's a problem worth talking about. Even if it costs him his relationship with NVIDIA.
