Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei sounds the alarm about President Trump’s decision to sell extremely powerful Nvidia chips to China, noting that the move is akin to handing a weapon of mass destruction to a rival nation.
In a new Bloomberg interview at Davos, Amodei says China has never really caught up with the US, despite last year’s DeepSeek moment.
Amodei says Chinese models are optimized to hit performance benchmarks, and he doesn’t see them as a threat to the top US LLMs.
“It’s actually very easy to optimize a model for a finite list of benchmarks. When we go out into the world, we’re competing against other companies for enterprise contracts. We see just honestly and candidly, we see Google, and we see OpenAI. Every once in a while, we see a couple other US players. I have almost never lost a deal, lost a contract to a Chinese model.”
While Amodei believes that US models still reign supreme, he says he rues the day that Trump made the call to relax export controls on Nvidia H200 chips.
“The thing that is holding them back, and they’ve said it themselves. The CEOs of these companies say it’s the embargo on chips that’s holding us back. They explicitly say this. And now, indeed, there are some policies, and I hope they change their mind, to explicitly send not quite our latest generation of chips, although it was reported that even that was being considered, but the generation of chips that’s just one back. That’s still extremely powerful. And we are many years ahead of China in terms of our ability to make chips. So I think it would be a big mistake to ship these chips.
The analogy I thought of, if you think about the incredible national security implications of building models that are essentially cognition, that are essentially intelligence. I’ve called where we’re going with this a country of geniuses and a data center. So imagine 100 million people smarter than any Nobel Prize winner. And it’s going to be under the control of one country or another. So I think this is crazy. I think it’s a bit like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea. I would just say that this particular policy, I think, is not well advised.”
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