EXPORT CONTROLS

“Yeah. So it actually happened in a pretty simple way, which is we had our own, you know, we had our coding models, which were good at coding. And and, you know, around the beginning of 2025, I said, I I think the time has come where you can have nontrivial acceleration of your own research. And then, you know, this thing, I, you know, I think it might have been originally called Claude CLI, and then the the name eventually got changed to Claude Code internally, was the thing that kind of everyone was using, and it was seeing fast internal adoption. And I looked at it, and I said, probably we should launch this externally.”

“I think diffusion is very real and and and and doesn't have to, you know, doesn't exclusively have to do with limitation limitations on the AI models. Like, again, there are people who use diffusion to to, you know, as kind of a buzzword to say this isn't a big deal. I'm not talking about that. I think AI will diffuse much faster than previous technologies have, but but not infinitely fast.”

“One, I write this thing called the DVQ, Dario Vision Quest. I wasn't the one who named it that. That's the name it it it received, and it's one of these names that I kind of I tried to fight it because it made it sound like I was, like, going off and smoking peyote or something. But the name just stuck. So I get up in front of the company. Every two weeks, I have, like, a three or four page document, and I just kind of talk through, like, three or four different topics about what's going on internally.”

“I actually believe it could be the case, is that is that dictatorships become morally obsolete. They become morally unworkable forms of government, and that and that and that the the the the crisis that that creates is is is sufficient to force us to find another way. I just wonder if it will motivate new ways of thinking about with with with the new technology, how to preserve and protect freedom.”

“The thing that was being voted on is we're going to ban all state regulation of AI for ten years with no apparent plan to to do any federal regulation of AI, which would take congress to pass, which is a very high bar. Given the serious dangers that I lay out in adolescence of technology around things like the, you know, kind of biological weapons and bioterrorism, autonomy risk, and the timelines we've been talking about, like, ten years is an eternity.”

“I don't know if this was intentional that you used a font metaphor, just after we learned that Secretary Rubio has condemned the use of Calibri in State Department of Correspondence. Yup, that came out. So apparently, we're going back to Times New Roman for official correspondence. What is wrong with Calibri? Is Calibri woke? It's too woke.”

“Everything about China's industrial policy for the last decades has been about self-sufficiency getting off of US tech. It is, as you know, a little bit more complicated than that. You've got private sector Chinese firms who are just going to want the best technology available. But look at what the Chinese government's response to this loosening of export controls has been. It's thanks very much for this unilateral concession. We're now going to go tell everybody in China to not buy the Nvidia chips because it runs directly counter to the goals of self-sufficiency.”

“That is all different now, and I think fundamentally, there is a question about whether this administration believes that we are in fact in a strategic competition with China or not. If you look at, for example, the National Security Strategy that came out earlier this week, it clearly emphasizes that there are some concerns with China. We have concerns particularly, and this is where the lens most seems to be, is through the economic lens. So much less emphasis on the security threat that China presents, much less emphasis on the US need to kind of keep China, I hate to say the word contained, but contained, you know, from a regional security perspective, and much more just on, let's figure out how we can make a deal with China.”

“But what we've seen from from the beginning, you know, at least if you look within anthropic, there's this bizarre 10 x per year growth in revenue that we've seen. Right? So, you know, in 2023, it was, like, zero to a 100,000,000. 2024, it was a 100,000,000 to a billion. 2025, it was a billion to, like, 9 or 10,000,000,000.”

“And so I could buy a trillion dollars. Actually, it would be, like, $5,000,000,000,000 of compute because it would be a trillion dollar a year for for five years. Right? I could buy a trillion dollars of compute that starts at the 2027. And if my if my revenue is not a trillion dollars, if it's even 800,000,000,000, there's no force on earth. There's there's no hedge on earth that could stop me from going bankrupt if I if I buy that much compute.”

“He said, when you use DeepSeq, it has no sense of humor. Like the more advanced Google engines, ChachiBG, OpenAI, and so forth, you can actually joke with them. They're developing a sense of humor, and that his theory was that over time, humans will respond to more human AI. And China is constrained because they literally have people using algorithms for word searches, but policing what's said about Xinjiang or Tibet or democracy.”

“A very similar thing played out more recently when the US released its export controls expanding how it applied the entity list, designations, it applied what's 50% rule, what kind of captures all subsidiaries that have a 50% ownership stake with the listed entity. Inadvertently perhaps, they didn't realize they're going to capture 20,000 to 30,000 additional Chinese companies. China reacted. That's where we saw the rarest export controls. So it's been this period of overreach and then backing down.”

“I think another big one to watch, particularly as we get closer to the midterms, is push back on the tariff and trade agenda. We're starting to see price issues in the United States. That's the kind of thing that really hits home for, you know, most Americans, who knows about the national security strategy, but they're going to go to the grocery store. And if it got really expensive to buy stuff, or if Christmas shopping is really expensive this year, that's the sort of thing that's going to change political sentiment.”

“So so on the ten years, I'm, like, you know, 90%, which is about as certain as you can be. Like, I think it's I think it's crazy to say that this won't happen by by by 2035. I have a strong view, 99, 95% that, like, all this will happen in ten years. Like, that's I think that's just a super safe bet. And then I have a hunch this is more like a fifty fifty thing that it's gonna be more like one to two, maybe more like one to three.”

“So, you know, one of my one of my, I guess, worries, although it's also an insight into into, you know, in into kind of what's happening is that, you know, some very critical decision will be will be some decision that, you know, someone just comes into my office and is like, Dario, you have two minutes. Like, you know, should we should we do, you know, should we do thing thing a or thing b on this, like, you know, someone gives me this random, you know, half page half page memo and is like, should we should we do a or b? And I'm like, I don't know. I have to eat lunch. Let's do b. And and, you know, that ends up being the most consequential thing ever.”

“So just to give a couple of examples, right, you've got this long list of bad things that China does economically that we're going to fix. How are we going to fix them? There is no guidance on how we are going to fix them. I mean, you can intuit from other parts of the strategy or just the actions that the Trump administration has taken to date, that a coercive, tariff-led approach would be the way to go, except we've already tried that, and it doesn't seem to be inducing China to change any of its behaviors.”

“We did a trade war game where we were trying to play out some of these dynamics with the US trying to make a deal with China as it's imposing tariffs on everyone else and trying to push a de-risking agenda, all these different factors. It was notable that in the course of the game, as soon as the United States started negotiating with China, all the other countries were like, well, we're not doing anything on China de-risking. We're not going to sanction China. We're not going to do more export controls. That's exactly what has played out in the real world.”