The CEO of Anthropic, the leading Artificial Intelligence company, on Tuesday warned against the Trump administration's recent decision to allow Nvidia to sell AI chips to China, comparing the move to selling nuclear weapons technology to North Korea.
Speaking during a panel discussion on artificial general intelligence, or AGI, at Davos, Dario Amodei said that shipping such powerful chips risks handing China the compute power needed to develop super-intelligent AI, with potentially far-reaching national security implications, AP reported.
“Are we going to, you know, sell nuclear weapons to North Korea, and, you know, because that produces some profit for Boeing?” Amodei said.
The Anthropic chief executive is not alone in raising concerns. Saif Khan, who served as director of technology and national security on the White House National Security Council under former US President Joe Biden, has also warned that the rule would substantially boost China's AI capabilities, Reuters reported.
‘Threaten humanity’ — Amodei on evolving AI tech
AI companies, including Anthropic, are racing to develop AGI, systems that reportedly have the capability to outperform human intelligence, though he noted that such technology can also carry risks that could threaten humanity, the news agency reported on Tuesday.
“That analogy should just make clear how I see this trade-off," he added, referring to the Trump administration's decision to greenlight Nvidia to export advanced AI chips to Beijing.
Trump approves exports of Nvidia AI chips
The Trump administration approved China-bound sales of Nvidia's second-most powerful AI chips last week, putting in place a rule that will likely kickstart shipments of the H200 despite deep concerns among China hawks in Washington, Reuters reported.
According to the regulations, the chips will be reviewed by a third-party testing lab to confirm their technical AI capabilities before they can be exported to Beijing, which cannot receive more than 50% of the total amount of chips sold to American customers.
This greenlight eases Biden-era restrictions that barred sales of advanced AI chips to China. The Trump administration, however, argues that the move is strategically necessary.
White House AI czar David Sacks believes that allowing controlled exports of Nvidia and AMD chips could discourage Chinese competitors - such as heavily sanctioned Huawei - from accelerating efforts to develop competing advanced chip designs, while preserving US companies' market dominance, the agency report said.
