Why Anthropic backs open-weight AI models but still won’t sign Nvidia CEO’s letter

4 min readNew DelhiUpdated: Jul 28, 2026 01:16 PM IST Dario Amodei, chief executive and co-founder of Anthropic, speaks during a conversation with Andrew Ross Sorkin at the DealBook Summit in New York, Dec. 3, 2025. (Karsten Moran/The New York Times) Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has sought to clarify the Claude-maker’s position on open-weight AI models after facing heat for being the lone major frontier AI company to not sign an open letter against the US government’s proposed curbs on some Chinese AI models. After days of remaining conspicuously silent, Amodei said that Anthropic has never advocated for a ban on open-weight models as a means of protecting its business. He also said that such models – whose weights are freely available for developers to download, modify, and deploy on their