Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei deflects White House scrutiny to Nvidia’s Jensen Huang

When the White House starts asking uncomfortable questions about AI technology ending up in Chinese hands, there’s a classic corporate playbook: point at someone else. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei appears to be running that play with impressive conviction, redirecting scrutiny toward Nvidia and its CEO Jensen Huang over the thorny issue of advanced chip exports to China. The nuclear analogy that started a war of words Amodei kicked off the hostilities in January 2026 by labeling the sale of Nvidia’s H200 chips to China as “crazy.” He didn’t stop there. He compared selling high-end semiconductors to a geopolitical adversary to arming them with nuclear weapons. Huang called the analogy “stupid.” Huang contends that restricting chip sales to China doesn’t actually slow down Chinese AI development. Instead, it pushes Beijing to accelerate domestic chip production, which would eventually create competitors that Nvidia wouldn’t face if it had simply kept the customer relationship. The Moonshot AI connection The feud took on new dimensions when a White House official accused Chinese startup Moonshot AI of distilling Anthropic’s model, called Fable, using restricted Nvidia hardware. For Nvid...