Anthropic’s CEO surprises Davos with Nvidia’s opposition

Last week, after changing the original ban, the US administration legal approval selling Nvidia’s H200 chips, along with AMD’s chip line, to authorized Chinese customers. It may not be the chipmaker’s flashiest, most advanced chips, but it’s the most advanced processors used for AI, which makes outsourcing contentious. And at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Tuesday, CEO of Anthropic Dario Amodei download on all managers and chip companies in the election.

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

“The company’s executives are saying, ‘It’s the chip ban that’s holding us back,'” Amodei said, in disbelief, in response to a question about the new regulations. The idea will come back to bite the US, he warned.

“We are years ahead of China in terms of our chip manufacturing capabilities,” he told Bloomberg’s editor-in-chief, who was interviewing him. “So I think it would be a big mistake to send these chips.” Amodei then painted a grim picture of what was at stake. He spoke of the “national security risks” of AI models that represent “awareness, which is essentially intelligence.” He compared future AI to “a world of experts in a data center,” saying he envisions “100 million people smarter than any Nobel Prize winner,” all under the control of one country or another.

The photo highlighted why they think chip exports are so important. But then a big problem came. “I think this is crazy,” Amodei said of the authorities’ actions. “It’s like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea and (boasting that) Boeing built the weapons.”

Do you hear that sound? The team at Nvidia, is screaming at their phones.

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

Two months ago, companies declared that economic relationsalong with a “deep technical cooperation” and cheery promises to enhance each other’s skills. Davos rushes in, and Amodei compares his friend to a weapons dealer.

Perhaps it was an unguarded moment – it is possible that he was swept up in his own words and brought out the metaphor. But given Anthropic’s strength in the AI ​​market, it seems he was comfortable speaking with confidence. The company has raised billions, is valued in the hundreds of billions, and Claude’s scripting assistant has long been recognized as the most beloved and advanced AI tool, especially among developers working on complex, real-time tasks.

It’s also possible that Anthropic really fears the Chinese AI labs and wants Washington to do something about it. If you want to get someone’s attention, comparing the number of nuclear weapons is a good way to do it.

But what is perhaps most surprising is that Amodei can sit on the stage in Davos, drop such a bombshell, and go to another group without fear that he has just messed up his business. The news cycle goes on, of course. Anthropic is also on a strong run right now. But it finds that AI competition has grown so much in the minds of its leaders that the usual barriers – business relationships, good relationships, good relationships – no longer apply. Amodei is not concerned with what he can and cannot say. More than anything else he said on the stage, that fearlessness is important to listen to.