By TOI Tech Desk
Publication Date: 2026-02-14 07:18:00
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has once again made it clear that he thinks selling advanced AI chips to China is a terrible idea. In a wide-ranging conversation on the Dwarkesh Patel podcast, Amodei laid out his case for why the US should keep its compute advantage locked down—directly contradicting what Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has been lobbying Washington to do for months now.Amodei didn’t mince words. He said the US shouldn’t be building data centres in China or shipping chips there, arguing that AI models powered by those chips are “essentially cognition, essentially intelligence.” His framing was blunt: sell cures for diseases to whoever wants them, build pharmaceutical industries in developing nations, but keep the data centres and the chips firmly out of authoritarian hands.He even floated a scenario where AI tools could be designed to protect citizens inside authoritarian countries from their own governments’ surveillance—a kind of individualized digital shield. It’s a bold idea, and Amodei admitted he doesn’t know if it would work. But he seemed genuinely interested in exploring it.
