American artificial intelligence startup company Anthropic’s CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei warned on Tuesday that American companies should not sell their advanced AI chips to China, stating that it affects national security.
Amodei, speaking during the World Economic Forum (WEF) held in Davos, Switzerland this week, told Bloomberg in an interview that the United States is “at least several years ahead of China” in high-end semiconductor design and manufacturing capabilities, and export controls are a key factor limiting the development of the AI industry in China.
“CEOs of Chinese technology companies themselves acknowledge that the U.S. chip ban has slowed down their development,” Amodei said. “Therefore, exporting these chips to China would be a major mistake.”
Amodei believes that relaxing controls would rapidly erode this structural advantage and have far-reaching implications for the U.S.-China tech competition landscape. He described the risk level of such actions as “a bit like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea,” showing his high level of concern about the consequences of technology outflow.
Amodei’s statement comes as the U.S. government conditionally announced allowing Nvidia to resume selling its H200 accelerator chips to the Chinese market.
According to the publicly disclosed policy framework, such transactions will be subject to case-by-case review and come with various restrictions, including ensuring sufficient domestic supply in the U.S., requiring third-party technical testing of exported chips, setting limits on the quantities sold to China, and Nvidia paying about 25% of related revenue to the U.S. government.
Currently, the U.S. and China are engaged in intense competition in the field of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). As a global leader in AI chips, Nvidia and its CEO Jensen Huang have long believed that excluding U.S. companies from the critical Chinese market will not prevent China from developing AI but may actually prompt domestic Chinese companies to accelerate their independent research and development of chips and related technologies, potentially undermining American companies’ leading position in the global AI industry in the long run.
Public financial data shows that before the U.S. imposed export controls on advanced chips to China in October 2022, China (including Hong Kong) was an important overseas market for Nvidia, accounting for nearly a quarter of its revenue in some quarters. As export controls were fully implemented and tightened, this proportion significantly dropped, reaching around 13% by 2025.
Numerous U.S. media reports indicate that Nvidia lobbied and coordinated within the U.S. government for several months to resume exports of AI chips like the H200 to China, including communication with the president and top government officials, emphasizing that failure to export would harm the company’s interests and U.S. competitiveness.
Meanwhile, from a competitive advantage perspective, Amodei presents a different view. He argues for further tightening export controls related to AI and computing power to ensure the U.S.’ long-term leadership in cutting-edge AI technology.
As Chinese AI companies have rapidly caught up in recent years, some concerns have arisen regarding the weakening of American technological superiority. DeepSeek, a Chinese company, has previously claimed that its large models can rival top U.S. products with significantly lower training costs.
Amodei downplays this, stating that such models are “highly optimized for limited benchmark tests,” with their actual commercial competitiveness remaining limited.
He also warns that if China gains access to more advanced American computing chips, it will substantially enhance the competitiveness of its model developers in the business market, especially in the field of “open-weighted models.” These models can be deployed internally by companies, making them attractive to industries such as finance, government, and large institutions with strict data security requirements.
In the U.S. Congress, senior Republicans, including House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Brian Mast, are actively promoting and supporting legislative actions advocating for further tightening export reviews on sensitive technologies like semiconductors and AI to prevent the Chinese Communist Party from acquiring cutting-edge American technology, maintaining America’s technological advantage in critical strategic industries.
Despite repeatedly warning about the potential threats posed by China, Amodei admits that in actual business bidding, the main competitors that Anthropic faces are still OpenAI and Google. He stated that Anthropic has “almost never lost to Chinese models in enterprise contract bidding,” but he also acknowledges that Chinese companies have begun to receive sporadic orders in the international market.
Currently, Anthropic has not publicly released the weights of its flagship models but instead offers services through an API and has entered into commercial partnerships, including with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Amodei concludes by urging Washington to reconsider its chip export policy to China, warning that continued relaxation of controls may lead to fundamental changes in the as yet undefined global AI competition landscape in the coming years. “I hope they change their minds,” he said.