Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei strongly opposes exporting high-end chips to China, calling it 'like giving nuclear weapons to North Korea'
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, the developer of the large-scale language model 'Claude' series, participated in the 'Bloomberg House Davos' held in Davos, Switzerland in conjunction with the World Economic Forum's Davos meeting, and reiterated his concerns about the export of high-performance chips such as the NVIDIA H200 to China.
Anthropic's CEO says Nvidia's H200 too powerful for China • The Register
Anthropic's Amodei on AI: Power and Risk - YouTube
Speaking with Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait at Bloomberg House Davos, Amodei expressed his view that China may not be catching up as much as people are making it out to be in the race to develop AI.
Regarding the 'DeepSeek-R1,' announced in November 2024, which was said to have performance comparable to OpenAI's AI, CEO Amodei pointed out that 'it was a model optimized for benchmarking.'
Chinese AI company DeepSeek releases 'DeepSeek-R1-Lite-Preview,' an inference AI model comparable to OpenAI o1, and plans to open source it - GIGAZINE
He said that because the benchmark content is finite, it is not that difficult to optimize, and in fact, his rivals for contracts with companies are Google and OpenAI, and that he has never lost a contract to a Chinese company.
'But you're protesting the Trump administration's supply of high-performance chips and video chips to China,' Micklethwait said.
Amodei acknowledged that this was true, but said that exporting powerful semiconductors, even if they were of the previous generation, would be a big mistake, even though Chinese CEOs acknowledged that they were suffering from the semiconductor embargo.
Furthermore, because building large-scale language models is 'building intelligence,' it has major implications for national security, and he described it as 'insane,' like having '100 million people smarter than Nobel Prize winners' under the control of a certain country. He sarcastically added, 'It's like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea and then bragging about it, saying, 'But we built them.''
Amodei pointed to the lifting of the embargo on the NVIDIA H200 and AMD Instinct MI325X. The US had previously restricted exports of cutting-edge semiconductor technology to China, allowing only lower-performance products to be exported. However, the US tightened the restrictions further, leading China to begin promoting domestic semiconductor production.
As a result, semiconductor manufacturers such as NVIDIA protested, fearing that the export restrictions would put them at a disadvantage, and in January 2026 the restrictions were significantly relaxed.
China has also notified domestic companies that it is banning the purchase of H200.
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