Nandini Roy Choudhury, writer
Brief news
- Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, acknowledges China’s DeepSeek as non-adversarial but emphasizes the need for stricter export controls on AI technology due to concerns about China’s authoritarian government and its potential military applications.
- DeepSeek’s rapid rise in the U.S. tech market, particularly with its AI model R1, has led to significant market reactions, including a historic loss in Nvidia’s market cap, raising alarms among U.S. senators about the startup being a potential threat.
- Amodei stresses the importance of the U.S. maintaining its competitive edge in AI development and argues against providing technological advantages to China, while also highlighting the necessity of developing superior AI models in democracies.
Detailed news
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, stated in a blog post on Wednesday that he does not consider China’s DeepSeek “themselves as adversaries.” However, he feels that export controls are more important than ever when it comes to artificial intelligence.
Amodei writes about DeepSeek, “In interviews they’ve done, they seem like smart, curious researchers who just want to make useful technology.” “However, they are beholden to a government that is authoritarian, has committed human rights violations, has acted aggressively on the world stage, and will be able to act even more freely in these ways if they are able to match the United States in artificial intelligence.”
This week, DeepSeek’s unexpected arrival in the United States and its rapid rise to the top of Apple’s App Store caused a stir in the tech markets. This led to a selloff of Nvidia’s shares, which resulted in the greatest one-day market cap loss in U.S. history on Monday. Analysts estimate that DeepSeek’s new reasoning AI model, R1, was much less expensive to develop than models created by U.S. competitors.
Anthropic is especially worried about this issue because it is competing with OpenAI, Google, and other companies to create the most sophisticated generative AI model. Anthropic has received billions of dollars from Amazon, and Google has just committed to invest more than $1 billion in the company. Anthropic was created by former OpenAI research officials, including Amodei.
On Monday, senators in the United States demanded that measures be taken to slow down the Chinese tech startup, with some referring to DeepSeek as “a serious threat.” Howard Lutnick, who has been nominated to be the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, claimed during his hearing on Wednesday that DeepSeek stole technology from the United States. David Sacks, the new White House czar for AI and cryptocurrency, tweeted on X that DeepSeek R1 demonstrates that President Trump was correct to revoke President Joe Biden’s executive order.
Trump signed an executive order last week that rolled back several of the Biden administration’s regulations regarding the development of artificial intelligence.
DeepSeek’s technology is open source, which means that corporations can run it on their own servers without sending data back to China. Some experts have stated that this makes it safe to use in the U.S. Amodei, however, stated that the progress made by DeepSeek demonstrates the necessity for the United States to maintain its position and refrain from relinquishing a significant portion of the market to China.
Amodei stated that the increase in DeepSeek’s popularity made it “even more existentially important” to impose restrictions on chip exports to China than it was a week ago. The model was developed in spite of a number of restrictions imposed by the Biden administration that limited the export of certain advanced semiconductors to China that could improve military capabilities.
Amodei wrote, “To be clear, they are not a way to avoid the competition between the United States and China.” In order to succeed, artificial intelligence businesses in the United States and other democracies must develop superior models compared to those in China. However, we should not provide the Chinese Communist Party any technological advantages when it is not necessary.
Anthropic, which was established in 2021, is currently in discussions to obtain funds at a valuation of $60 billion. This is primarily owing to the success of its Claude chatbot, which competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.
Source : CNBC news
