Link CopyTwitterLinkedinWhatsappWhy Anthropic Refused Huang's Letter Over Its Distillation ClauseAnthropic stayed off the open-weights letter Jensen Huang published on 24 July 2026, now signed by 50 companies including Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and Google. Anthropic says it supports open-weight models and has always opposed a ban. The clause it objects to asks Washington to stop treating model distillation as misappropriation.Jensen Huang used the first post of his life on X to publish a letter, and the document has been treated almost everywhere as a loyalty test on open-source AI. Twenty-five companies signed it on 24 July. Eleven million views later the count had doubled to 50, with OpenAI, Google, AMD, Cisco, Cloudflare, GitHub, Block and Ollama joining the second wave. Two names of consequence stayed off: Amazon, and Amazon's largest investee, Anthropic.Three days on, Anthropic published its own position and opened with a flat denial. "Anthropic has never advocated for a ban on open-weights models," the company wrote, italics its own. Dario Amodei repeated it in interviews the same day.About The AuthorAt heart, I am a storyteller drawn to the watershed moments that bend the technology landscape. I braid narrative with data, humanise statistics, and trace the arc from first spark to world-changing impact. My reportage, features and reviews are witty, sardonic, visual and vivid, using anecdote to illuminate rather than eviscerate.