> If a volatile administration can ban you from running code that you wrote -- without any democratic processes like a law or lawsuit -- why would you build anything in the US?

That's not what's going on. But, what's going on has always been possible. Even to this day, there's software that's is subject to export controls. There's also an often-changing list of countries that US-based companies are prohibited from doing any business with. For software, this has been going on since the 1990s. "Weirdly", the US-based software business has been doing really well.

Anthropic was instructed to prevent Foreign Nationals from using a subset of their software. Anthropic chose to prevent everyone from using that subset of their software.

Anthropic had other options. One of those options was to gate access to the software behind the ID, biometrics, and -if present- passport capture that Big Tech seems to be very excited to do. I expect that -if they end up changing anything at all about access control- we'll see them doing something very similar to that in the coming weeks.