Welcome to the podcast.
I'm your host, Jaden Schaefer.
Today on the show, we're talking about what Anthropic 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 gonna 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 AI boxai.
We have a tool, vibe coder, that lets you explain any tool you want to create, whether that's a newsletter generator, an email responder or all sorts of interesting tools you can do.
And we will have our AI builder automatically create that for you.
We'll link together different AI models, put in prompts for you and build a tool for you.
You do not have to know how to code or be a developer.
This is something I personally use and love and have automated a lot of tasks that I do every single day.
If you want to check it out, go look at AIbox.ai.
It's $20 a month and you also get access to all of the top AI models for $20 a month.
So 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.
Um, 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 um And 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 and 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.
He 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, It is difficult to apply that when running a business that requires massive capital.
So anyways, he's, yes, very famous.
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 was, 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 Mickleweight.
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.
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 DeepSeek getting access and competing with you.
He 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.
So 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 smarter than any Nobel Prize winner all pointed in the same direction.
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.
He said it's a bit like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea and bragging that Boeing made the castings.
OK, 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 that Nvidia sells to American companies are kind of like their older chips, their 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.
And 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?
Anthropic 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.
I mean, basically.
And they also recently committed up to $10 billion investment into Anthropic.
So they're a big investor putting $10 billion in or at least committing that.
And now they're getting criticized.
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.
They were going to complete this with.
You know, they had all of these like different promises about how they were 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 help 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, will 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 just did 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 platform, to optimize their platforms.
So it just basically makes some more money.
So this is kind of the deal that NVIDIA was working out with them.
If you now fast forward to Davos, and now Amadeo is basically comparing NVIDIA, his new partner, to an arms dealer.
I think it's possible that his analogy was, you know, maybe he's kind of talking off of the cuff.
It'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 Anthropic'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, is 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.
So 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.
This 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's not doesn't have a lot of fear.
I think there's a lot of good to that as well.
And maybe some people criticize that.
I think that there's a lot of good to that.
And I think maybe that 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.
You 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 AI boxai.
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 at AIboxai.
There's a link in the description.
I'll catch you in the next episode.
