Anthropic CEO says selling advanced AI chips to China is ‘crazy’
He says that China remains behind in its AI development and is held back by the embargo on chips
[BERLIN] Anthropic chief executive officer Dario Amodei said that selling advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chips to China is a blunder with “incredible national security implications”, as the US moves to allow Nvidia to sell its H200 processors to Beijing.
“It would be a big mistake to ship these chips,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwait at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “I think this is crazy. It’s a bit like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea.”
US President Donald Trump is easing a ban on advanced AI chip exports to China, marking a significant shift away from a policy intended to keep Beijing and its military from developing AI using American technology.
The move represents a major win for Nvidia, which argues that China will develop domestic alternatives if the ban remains in place.
Introduced more than two years ago, the H200 would be the most advanced AI chip to be legally exported to Chinese customers.
Nvidia sells its more-advanced Blackwell generation in the US, and is preparing to switch to an even speedier family of chips named after the astronomer Vera Rubin. Sales of those processors will remain restricted on national security grounds.
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AI chipmaking rival Advanced Micro Devices is also seeking clearance for sales of its MI325X chip in China.
Amodei said that China remains behind in its AI development and is held back by the embargo on chips.
He has in the past urged the Trump administration to maintain the chip restrictions on China. Last year at Davos, he said that he was worried about “1984 scenarios, or worse”, referring to the dystopian George Orwell novel about totalitarianism. BLOOMBERG
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