Anthropic CEO criticizes Nvidia over China chip exports

Speaking on Tuesday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei sharply criticized the U.S. administration’s recent decision to allow the sale of high-performance processors used for AI to China. Last week, the U.S. administration, which acts as the regulator responsible for chip export policy, approved the sale of Nvidia H200 chips and AMD chips to approved Chinese customers. Amodei, speaking in an interview with media outlet Bloomberg, characterized the administration’s move as crazy. “It’s a bit like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea and [bragging that] Boeing made the casings,” said Dario Amodei, the Anthropic CEO.

The public criticism is particularly striking because Nvidia is a major partner, investor, and chip supplier to Anthropic. Just two months ago, the companies announced their financial relationship and a deep technology partnership. Under the agreement, Nvidia is investing up to $10 billion in Anthropic. While Anthropic runs its models on cloud servers provided by Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, it relies on Nvidia to supply the graphics processing units (GPUs) that power its AI models. Amodei noted that chip company executives often claim that trade restrictions are what holds them back, but he strongly rejected this perspective.

Amodei argued that the U.S. holds a substantial advantage in hardware development that should not be compromised. He stated that the U.S. is many years ahead of China in its ability to manufacture chips, and added that shipping these processors would be a major error. To illustrate the national security implications of AI, Amodei described future models as representing essentially cognition and intelligence. He compared them to a country of geniuses in a data center, suggesting an AI system could eventually contain 100 million people smarter than any Nobel Prize winner under the control of a single state. He warned that the decision to allow these exports would ultimately have negative consequences for the U.S.

Why it matters

Anthropic’s CEO publicly criticized his own primary investor and partner, Nvidia, and the U.S. government’s export policy, signaling that AI leaders increasingly view the AI race as an existential issue that overrides traditional business constraints.