FIRST MOVER?
“This is the first time a major US AI company has imposed a formal, public prohibition of this kind,” said Nicholas Cook, a lawyer focused on the AI industry with 15 years of experience at international law firms in China.
“The immediate commercial effect may be modest, since US AI providers already face barriers to operating in this market and relevant groups have been self-selecting for their own locally developed AI tech,” he told AFP.
But “taking a stance like this will inevitably lead to questions as to whether others will or should take a similar approach.”
An Anthropic executive told the Financial Times that the move would have an impact on revenues in the “low hundreds of millions of dollars.”
The San Francisco-headquartered company was founded in 2021 by former executives from OpenAI.
It announced this week it had raised US$13 billion in its latest funding round, saying it now has more than 300,000 business customers.
The number of accounts on pace to generate more than US$100,000 annually is nearly seven times larger than a year ago, Anthropic said Tuesday.
When questioned on Anthropic’s announcement at a regular briefing, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun said he was not familiar with the situation.
“The Chinese side has consistently opposed the politicisation, instrumentalisation, and weaponisation of science, technology, and economic and trade issues. Such practices are not in the interest of any party,” he said.
Assumptions that the US was far ahead of China in the fast-moving AI sector were upended this year when Chinese start-up DeepSeek unveiled a chatbot that matched top American systems for an apparent fraction of the cost.
