Artificial intelligence safety company Anthropic wants the U.S. to impose stronger export controls on advanced semiconductors to stop China from achieving advanced artificial intelligence first.
Anthropic believes breakthrough AI technology will emerge in the next few years and thinks export controls are necessary to slow China from racing ahead for the powerful technology.
“The U.S. currently leads in advanced semiconductor technology, and export controls capitalize on the trend of computing power doubling every two years, so while U.S. chip technology continues advancing, China’s progress is slowed,” Anthropic said in a post on its website. “This growing efficiency gap means that by 2027, countries using older chips could face AI training costs that are ten times higher than those with cutting-edge American technology.”
In one of its final acts before leaving office, the Biden administration proposed a regulatory framework for AI diffusion one week before President Trump took office.
The interim final rule planned new controls on AI chips and model weights, and it included a provision giving the new administration fewer than four months to solicit public feedback. Model weights refer to the parameters of AI models.
The proposal outraged the semiconductor sector, which viewed the proposed regulations as risking unintended and lasting damage to the economy.
The AI safety team at Anthropic, however, sees the more aggressive controls as perhaps necessary to stop the shift of advanced AI innovation overseas.
Anthropic estimates that powerful artificial intelligence, also known as artificial general intelligence or AGI, is poised to emerge as soon as the end of next year and likely before the end of 2027.
Specifically, Anthropic is preparing for the arrival of AI that will prove capable of controlling robots, navigating digital interfaces used by humans for digital work, performing autonomous reasoning over long periods of time, and completing intellectual tasks “matching or exceeding” the abilities of Nobel Prize winners.
“A useful conceptual framework is to envision powerful AI as equivalent to ‘a country of geniuses in a datacenter’ — a concentration of intellectual capability that fundamentally transforms our understanding of what is possible,” Anthropic said in a letter to the Trump administration.
Anthropic said any pause or weakening of export controls would give China an opportunity to stockpile advanced semiconductors and accelerate its efforts to close the gap just as transformative AI is expected to emerge.
“As powerful AI systems approach breakthrough capabilities by 2027, the strategic imperative to preserve America’s compute advantage over China has never been more urgent,” Anthropic said in its letter. “Export controls on advanced semiconductors are not merely technical regulations — they are foundational to America’s national security and economic prosperity in an era defined by AI innovation.”
