Anthropic’s chief executive has slammed America’s move to let Nvidia $NVDA sell its H200 advanced artificial intelligence chips to China, saying it has “incredible national security implications.”
“We are many years ahead of China in terms of our ability to make chips. … It would be a big mistake to ship these chips,” Dario Amodei said at the World Economic Forum in Davos. “I think this is crazy. It’s a bit like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea.”
“The CEOs of these [Chinese] companies say it’s the embargo on chips that’s holding us back,” he said. “They explicitly say this.”
At the event held by Bloomberg, Amodei said of the U.S. policy: “I hope they change their mind.” The H200 chips are just one generation back from the most advanced, the…
Anthropic’s chief executive has slammed America’s move to let Nvidia $NVDA sell its H200 advanced artificial intelligence chips to China, saying it has “incredible national security implications.”
“We are many years ahead of China in terms of our ability to make chips. … It would be a big mistake to ship these chips,” Dario Amodei said at the World Economic Forum in Davos. “I think this is crazy. It’s a bit like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea.”
“The CEOs of these [Chinese] companies say it’s the embargo on chips that’s holding us back,” he said. “They explicitly say this.”
At the event held by Bloomberg, Amodei said of the U.S. policy: “I hope they change their mind.” The H200 chips are just one generation back from the most advanced, the Blackwell chip, and are “still extremely powerful,” he added.
The H200 had previously been embargoed by Washington amid concerns that China could get a technological and military edge over the U.S., but President Donald Trump gave Nvidia the green light to sell the processors to China recently. He said he would allow the chip sales to “approved customers” in China and collect a 25% fee.
Nvidia has consistently called for the chip to be allowed to be sold in China, one of its biggest markets. When the ban initially came into place, analysts estimated lost sales could cost Nvidia as much as $15 billion in annual revenue — and around $3 billion in U.S. tax receipts.
The chip sales hit another snag last week when Chinese customs officials blocked shipments of the newly approved product from entering the country, per reports. Nvidia had been planning for more than 1 million orders from the country, the Financial Times reported, citing two people familiar with the matter.
Sources also told Reuters that Chinese government officials had summoned domestic tech company bosses to warn them against buying the chips unless it was necessary.