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.”

He still did not sign. He also held his line that the dangerous ingredients, chiefly advanced chips reaching authoritarian states, need tighter control.

Isolated on every other front too

The pattern repeats across the board. The Pentagon blacklisted Anthropic in February, after a fight over whether Claude could be used for surveillance or autonomous weapons. One senior defence official said on Friday there was “no AI company more hostile to the warfighter.”

On safety, Anthropic has pushed harder than anyone. It has backed state AI laws and floated an FAA-style regulator to vet models before release. Yet when the White House flagged a security flaw this summer, Anthropic disputed how serious it was. The row helped trigger export controls that forced two of its models offline for nearly three weeks.

Then there is distillation. Anthropic has accused Chinese labs of training cheaper models on Claude’s outputs in “industrial-scale” campaigns, the New York Times reported.

Critics call distillation a normal part of AI development. They also note the awkward timing. Anthropic had just settled a $1.5bn copyright lawsuit over pirated books used to train its own models.

Alone, and winning anyway

The isolation is not total. Anthropic did join more than 1,100 employees from rival labs this week in a petition urging Washington to help “deliberately pace” frontier AI. Its central worry, that the technology is moving faster than anyone can safely steer it, is now shared across the industry.

And for all the friction, Anthropic is not losing. Its models still top most independent benchmarks, and enterprises keep paying premium prices despite the grumbling over cost and restrictions. It reached a $965bn valuation in May, ahead of OpenAI, and is heading for an IPO that could value it higher still.

The traits that strand it in every policy fight, caution and a refusal to bend, are the same ones that built its lead. Anthropic would rather be right than liked, and for now it can afford to be.

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