The chief executive of a leading artificial intelligence startup has labelled the US’s decision to allow the sale of powerful AI chips to China as “crazy”, likening it to selling nuclear weapons to North Korea.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said the Trump administration’s move last week to approve Chinese sales of Nvidia’s H200 chip – the company’s second most powerful AI chip – had “incredible national security implications” for the US.
“We are many years ahead of China in terms of our ability to make chips,” Mr Amodei said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
“It would be a mistake to ship these chips… I think this is crazy. It’s a bit like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea.”
Nvidia currently supplies Anthropic with its chips to power its artificial intelligence models, including its popular AI assistant Claude.
Mr Amodei’s comments comparing Nvidia to an international arms dealer come just two months after Anthropic and Nvidia announced that they were establishing a “deep technology partnership”.
On Monday, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hasabis downplayed the threat posed by China, claiming that Chinese AI companies are about six months behind the leading labs in the US and Europe.
The tech boss claimed the industry-wide panic caused by the release of DeepSeek’s R1 model last year was a “massive overaction” despite being personally impressed by the technology.
“They’re very good at kind of catching up to where the frontier is, and increasingly capable of that,” Mr Hasabis said at the World Economic Forum.
“But I think they’ve yet to show they can innovate beyond the frontier.”
Under the latest agreement to allow the sale of Nvidia chips in China, customers must demonstrate “sufficient security procedures” and may not use them for military applications.
President Donald Trump said the deal would also limit the number of chips sold to Chinese customers in order to “keep America’s lead in AI”.
In a statement at the time, Nvidia said: “We applaud President Trump’s decision to allow America’s chip industry to compete to support high paying jobs and manufacturing in America.
“Offering H200 to approved commercial customers, vetted by the Department of Commerce, strikes a thoughtful balance that is great for America.”
