Anthropic CEO Criticizes NVIDIA Over AI Chip Sales to China

0:00Welcome to the podcast. I'm your host, Jaden Schaefer. Today on the show, we're talking about what Anthropics CEO Dario Amadeo has recently said at Davos. He's been criticizing NVIDIA and the Trump administration in how they're handling AI chips getting sent to China. This is a really fascinating topic. A lot of people are saying that he's talking his own book and wants his company to be protected from China, but others say that he might actually have a point as he's bringing up nuclear options, which are wild. So we're going to get into all of that on the show today. Before we do, I wanted to mention, if you want to be able to build any tools and you're not a developer, I'd love for you to try out my own startup, which is AIbox.ai.

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1:11So go check it out. There's a link in the description. All right, let's get into what Dario Amadeo said. So I think just as a little bit of a backup and a background on this, last week the Trump administration formally approved the sale of NVIDIA's H200 chips. And this is interesting because they had kind of previously walked back an earlier restriction. they also approved some comparable AMD line chips and all of these are going to be approved to sell to China so they're not going to be the most cutting-edge processors that Nvidia or AMD make but they are really powerful chips and what's really interesting is apparently Dario Amadeo the CEO of Anthropic has been setting off alarm bells and he recently on Tuesday at Davos made a whole bunch of public comments about this where he said he was very concerned so he was speaking at the World Economic Forum.

1:59And he was criticizing both the Trump administration and NVIDIA for backing this move and basically being very supportive of it. I think this was kind of interesting because there was a lot of different forces. One of those is that NVIDIA, it's not just the supplier of Anthropic, they're also one of the largest partners and investors in Anthropic. So it's interesting to see Anthropic criticizing its partner and investor. Now, this isn't the first time that Dario has criticized one of his investors. He also is famous for criticizing both Qatar and the United Arab Emirates who are investors in his last round of funding.

2:32He said that he was not thrilled that he had to take money from them. And he specifically had a quote that went viral. He said that no bad person should ever benefit from our success. It is difficult to apply that when running a business that requires massive capital. So anyways, he's yes, very famous. He I don't think he holds back when it comes to criticizing his partners and his investors. this one a lot of people were surprised by something that he said is the ceos of these companies say it's the embargo on chips that's holding us back so he was kind of responding to the questions about the revised export rules he sounded like really shocked and he said that the decision would ultimately hurt the united states he said quote we are many years ahead of china in our ability to make chips he was talking to bloomberg's editor-in-chief john micklewaite they had an interview and he said so i think it would be a big mistake to ship these chips essentially he's saying that the united states shouldn't allow chips period to be shipped to china which is interesting and obviously i think a lot of people are criticizing him saying well you're just saying that because you're worried about the chinese ai companies like deep thing deep seek getting access and competing with you um he uh escalated it a little bit beyond just competition he described ai systems as having enormous national security implications he called them, you know, essentially cognition and essentially intelligence.

3:51So he didn't say they were intelligence, but he's saying, I mean, basically said that. He then asked the audience to imagine a future where one country controls what amounts to a country of geniuses in a data center, the equivalent of 100 million minds rather than any smarter than any Nobel Prize winner, all pointed in the same direction. So I think his framing there is making this really clear why chip exports are so much like they matter so much to him. He then had a line that made, I think, basically made his remarks go very viral. Everyone was talking about, he said, I think this is crazy talking about how the administration was going to let the chips be shipped at all.

4:29He said, it's a bit like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea and bragging that Boeing made the castings. Okay, obviously, this is pretty extreme. I mean, we've been seeing these kind of these basically these chip deals going down for a long time a lot of the drama around this and selling to China I mean Trump has banned chips being sold to China for quite a while but has now recently opened up Nvidia being able to sell chips to China but with that there's a 25 % tariff that Nvidia has to pay and in addition to that these aren't the top of the line chips Nvidia sells to American companies are kind of like they're older chips they're older models and they're able to sell them so in any case some people are saying Dario is worried about what the Chinese companies are going to do.

5:09And some people say that he is right on the money by saying we're selling nuclear weapons to China, who, of course, already has nuclear weapons. But in any case, somewhere I think you can imagine that NVIDIA is blowing up his phone, not super happy about all of the comments, because NVIDIA isn't just a semiconductor company, right? Anthropoc obviously relies on a lot of cloud infrastructure companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. and every single one of those platforms ultimately runs on nvidia's gpus so right now nvidia sits at basically the center of the modern ai stack like you cannot build ai without them um i mean basically and they also recently committed up to 10 billion dollars investment into anthropic so they're a big investor uh putting 10 billion dollars in or at least committing that and now they're they're getting criticized um just two months ago anthropic and nvidia actually announced that they were going to build basically a partnership on a deep technology that they're working on.

6:07They were going to complete this with, you know, they had all of these like different promises about how they're going to optimize each other's systems. This is actually something that we see a lot from chips or cloud software or cloud platforms where they basically make deals with these big hyperscalers like Anthropic and OpenAI and Google because, you know, they're saying like, look, if you train your models with us, if you work with us, you'll teach us what we need to do and what we need to optimize in our systems is actually very beneficial for the cloud platforms because then, you know, if they can say, look, we helped train OpenAI's latest model, which is the number one model, every other company will say, hey, well, it looks like they are kind of the standard of excellence.

6:41We'll go with XYZ company, which is typically Amazon, who's done a lot with Anthropic or Google, who's done a lot with Anthropic. And then, of course, Microsoft has done a lot with OpenAI. They're all kind of like basically the big cloud providers are kind of vying for some of the big AI companies to be on their platforms to optimize their platforms. So it will it just basically make some more money. So this is kind of the deal that NVIDIA was working out with them. We now fast forward to Davos. Now Amadeo is basically comparing his NVIDIA, his new partner, to an arms dealer. I think it's possible that his analogy was, you know, is maybe he's kind of talking off of the cuff.

7:18It's kind of the product of being a CEO. You get a little bit carried away by your own rhetoric sometimes. But I think given Anthropik's position right now, it's also just as likely that he literally felt there's no real need to hold back. He's raised billions of dollars. He has a massive valuation, which is in the hundreds of billions. And Claude, his coding assistant, is basically the best coding assistant out there. It's, you know, the most trusted tool among developers. It's working on a lot of complex real-world software. So I think it's definitely possible that Anthropic is genuinely fearing the pace and ambition of a lot of the Chinese AI labs, and he wants Washington to kind of respond accordingly.

7:56So if the goal is to get attention, I think definitely talking about nuclear, you know, selling nuclear bombs is a very reliable way to do that. I think what is most interesting, though, is how freely he can make those comments without appearing worried about the follow. Right. He's not worried about what the news is going to say. It's a very well capitalized company. And so I think all of this is interesting. I think it shows that the leaders of a lot of the AI companies today, the race feels existential to them, right? Traditional things like investors being sensitive or strategic partnerships or kind of having this diplomatic restraint.

8:30This doesn't really seem to apply with a lot of the AI companies today. And so I think Amadeo didn't sound like someone who's kind of carefully weighing what he could say or already couldn't. He basically was saying exactly what I believe he thinks. He's got a lot of confidence. He doesn't have a lot of fear. I think there's a lot of good to that as well. I know maybe some people criticize that. I think that there's a lot of good to that. And I think maybe that detail in particular is worth paying a lot of attention to as far as what's going to happen with AI in the future. And it feels like we have some leaders in the space that will speak their mind, whether they're right or wrong.

9:04You have very opinionated people between him and Elon Musk and a lot of the other players. So it'll be interesting to see what happens in the future. Thank you so much for tuning into the podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, make sure to leave a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts and make sure to check out AIbox.ai. If you'd like to vibe code an AI tool without knowing how to code, without being a developer, you can explain what you want and we'll create it for you. AIbox.ai, there's a link in the description. I'll catch you in the next episode.