Six months ago, Anthropic was the darling of America’s AI boom. It led on the models and was loudest on the ethics. This summer, it finds itself alone.
The Claude maker is now the odd one out in nearly every big AI policy fight, Axios reported. It is the most valuable startup in the world, and at the same time the most isolated lab in the industry. The two facts turn out to be connected.
Alone on open weights
The clearest sign came last week. Anthropic was the only frontier lab that declined to sign an open letter urging Washington not to restrict open-weight models. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang led it. Google and OpenAI, its two closest rivals, both signed. That left Anthropic defending tighter controls on the very business model all three still lean on.
Dario Amodei tried to calm the row himself. In a blog post, Anthropic’s chief executive insisted the company has never called for banning open models. He even called weaker ones “a public good.”
