alt Hacker NewsI can see a limited way this benefits Anthropic. They've been having issues with one or more Chinese companies using Anthropic models' outputs at high scale to train their own models. By restricting Fable and Mythos temporarily and then rolling out to their most important customers first, then requiring identity verification, they may be able to slow that behavior significantly.
They are losing a ton of money on this and would be much much better off if people (Americans or not) had been building with Fable over the past few weeks rather than not
If Anthropic wanted to continue slow rolling their best model to a select few companies they could've kept expanding mythos access instead
Not to mention the fact that OpenAI has had time to prep 5.6 for release so that there will actually be an alternative around the same intelligence point as Fable. This is just all around terrible for Anthropic.
If you want a conspiracy theory, the one that says "this is corporate assassination" or "the US government does want to be in the business of picking winners" is much much much closer to the truth than yours.
Rather than buying either conspiracy theory, though, I expect Hanlon's razor describes the situation best (incompetence on one side, inability to coordinate/communicate effectively with the current administration on the other)