Anthropic’s CEO Just Called Nvidia an Arms Dealer (and Jensen Heard It Live)

Happy “He’s Definitely Got a Point” Day for all who celebrate… 

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei… aka the guy building Claude, aka the robot that’s going to have you Googling “how to become a lineman” by Q4… went to Davos and decided to actually drop some sauce. In short: Amodei said U.S. chipmakers like Nvidia should not be selling advanced AI chips to China… and compared it to “selling nuclear weapons to North Korea.”

(Source: Giphy) 

Now in case you didn’t know, this is NOT a completely normal thing to say about your business partner in public… but it’s kind of the truth. For context, the U.S. just approved Nvidia’s H200 chips (and some AMD stuff) to be sold to approved Chinese customers after previously blocking it. They’re not the absolute newest shiniest “God chip,” but they’re still high-performance AI processors. And yet, they’re still powerful AF. 

Which is why Amodei pieced out on doing the usual CEO dance where you say “we support American innovation” and then wink at the camera. Instead, he exclaimed that it’s “insane” and like handing the other team our playbook. He even hit the crowd with the full doomer poetry about AI being like a “country of geniuses in a data center”... think 100 million Nobel Prize-level brains locked in a server rack, controlled by whichever government wins the compute war. Which is honestly a sick visual. 

(Source: Yahoo Finance) 

Translation: We’re all gonna have “Sara Connor” stamped on our foreheads in the near future. That said, Anthropic isn’t some random nonprofit throwing rocks from the sidelines. Nvidia is a major partner and investor in Anthropic. Meaning the guy on stage basically called Jensen an arms dealer… while still using Jensen’s chips to power his entire company. Savage.

But again, Amodei isn’t totally wrong. If you believe AI is a once-in-history leverage point (which every AI CEO conveniently believes), then shipping serious compute to China is like selling steroids to your rival right before the Olympics. On the other side though, Nvidia is a business. . And businesses like money. Especially when the number has commas. And the U.S. government loves “national security” until it starts costing GDP, market share, or re-election risk. So we get this weird middle ground where everyone acts tough, then quietly approves the exports anyway, then pretends it’s fine because the chips are “not the most advanced.” Sounds legit. 

(Source: Giphy) 

Meanwhile, the real takeaway isn’t necessarily the chip policy. It’s the fact Amodei can say something that spicy, on a stage that important, while tied at the hip to the company he’s dragging… and still walk away like nothing happened (presumably because the AI race has cooked everyone’s brains already). Of course, we’ll see what comes of this… and if anything changes. Spoiler: It probably won’t. But hey, at least we got some drama from Davos. Now let’s all collectively clench as we wait to find out what Trump’s “you’ll find out” actually means. Until next time, friends… 

At the time of publishing, Stocks.News does not hold positions in companies mentioned in the article.