Dario Amodei, the CEO of the AI company Anthropic, has responded to the current hysteria in his industry and the financial markets around a new and surprisingly advanced Chinese AI model called DeepSeek by saying it proves the United States needs export controls on chips to China in order to ensure China doesn’t “take a commanding lead on the global stage, not just for AI but for everything.”
As I wrote earlier this week, Amodei believes that DeepSeek’s current advantages over American AI companies are overstated and temporary. The true cost of the DeepSeek R1 is not entirely clear and almost certainly much higher than DeepSeek’s paper claims because it is building on previous research published by American companies and DeepSeek’s own previously released V3 model. Additionally, Amodei argues that American companies will be able to recreate the same efficiencies in their model training soon, if they haven’t already, and then gain the lead again when those efficiencies are paired with American companies’ much greater access to more and better. The US already has export controls on chips to China, and Amodei argues that DeepSeek shows that they are “more existentially important than they were a week ago.”