In a surprising turn of events at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, publicly criticized Nvidia, a key partner and investor in his company. His comments generated quite a bit of shock when he compared Nvidia’s business practices to those of an arms dealer. He cautioned that allowing advanced chips into China’s hands would undermine global security and stability.
Nvidia, the world’s biggest chipmaker by market value, has grabbed the spotlight as a driving force reshaping the technology world. Recently, it made headlines with its announcement of a potential up to $10 billion investment in Anthropic. This partnership has enormously escalated the visibility of both enterprises. Anthropic’s previous claims to fame were the creation of Claude, an AI coding assistant that has received considerable praise and adoption.
Amodei’s remarks came on the heels of Nvidia’s recent blessing from the U.S. administration. This licensing approval now permits Nvidia to sell its H200 chips, advanced AI chips, to certain Chinese customers. This latest action brings Nvidia to the leading edge of an intensely competitive tech sector. Continuing, it has pushed back on the sales, calling out the harmful implications of these fire sales.
“It’s a bit like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea and [bragging that] Boeing made the casings,” Amodei stated during his speech at Davos, emphasizing the potential risks associated with Nvidia’s decisions.
Nvidia’s CEO recently described this technocratic vision of artificial intelligence as a “country of geniuses in a data center.” This analogy drives home how transformative these AI technologies can be. Nvidia has aligned itself closely with technology partners Microsoft and Anthropic. This places the company at the center of both defining how we use the technology and holding the industry accountable beyond being just another chipmaker.
While they’ve worked together, Amodei said he was uncomfortable with what their work with Nvidia meant. This close relationship has greatly inflated Anthropic’s valuation, putting its value in the hundreds of billions. Amodei pointed to a commonality among today’s big tech CEOs. They often dismiss concerns over chip exports to adversaries such as China. He added that the CEOs of these firms are saying, “The embargo on chips is stopping us.” He warned that this dominant narrative risks focusing us on a too narrow set of risks.
Nvidia’s chips are hugely desirable for their performance and capabilities, making them purpose-built for AI development. As we all know, geopolitical tensions are through the roof. This dynamic raises deeply troubling issues concerning the prudent allocation of sophisticated chips to China.
