AXIOS (Zachary Basu) - Anthropic's lonely island
Anthropic spent this winter and spring as the darling of America's AI boom, conquering the frontier while casting itself as the industry's moral conscience. - By summer, the Claude maker had found itself alone on an island of its own principles. Why it matters: Anthropic is simultaneously the world's most valuable startup and its most isolated AI leader. The company's idiosyncrasies have strained its relationship with developers, policymakers and partners as it barrels toward a potential trillion-dollar IPO . Driving the news: Anthropic is the only frontier AI lab that declined to sign an open letter led by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang urging Washington not to restrict open-weight models, a category currently dominated by China. -…