By Tobias Mann
Publication Date: 2026-01-20 22:10:00
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei isn’t happy about the US allowing Nvidia to sell GPUs to Chinese companies, and likened the decision to giving nuclear weapons to an adversary.
“The CEOs of these [Chinese] companies say it’s the embargo on US chips that’s holding them back,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this week. “I think it’s a big mistake to ship these chips.”
Amodei’s comments come just over a month after the Trump administration announced it would allow shipments of Nvidia H200 accelerators to Chinese customers so long as Uncle Sam gets a 25 percent cut of the revenues. It’s now up to Chinese authorities to allow local buyers to acquire the GPUs.
Anthropic wants stricter controls on AI exports, a hawkish position that contrasts sharply with chipmakers like AMD and Nvidia, which have warned that closing the door on China, which is home to roughly half of the world’s AI researchers, would result in a technological decoupling.
“The US currently leads in advanced semiconductor technology and export controls capitalize on the trend of computing power doubling every two years, so while US chip…
