I think it’s more than that. Piecing together the perspective of a few commentators in this post - it’s plausible Anthropic is trying to shift the narrative from US vs. Rest of the world to US vs. China.

In other words, they want to sell Fable or future more powerful models to rest of the world (presumably all future models are going to be more powerful than current gen). One way they can sell this is to the government is by scapegoating China (which is their primary concern anyway).

This is working on the presumption that non-US companies form a material portion of their current revenue.