OpenAI also literally announced that they send data to law enforcement after a judge told them they had to do so.
Not Mullvad. Swedish police showed up looking for some dat, Mullvad didn't even collect what they wanted, police left empty handed.
The specifics vary by country, but basically all legal systems require you to comply with what they say and impose penalties if you don't. I don't know if there are any countries where it's legal to ignore the courts, but I would imagine that their court systems don't work too well.
See Wilson v. United States
Tech is full of people that make extremely good money, from other people's personal information, and they plug their ears and sing "La-la-laaaa-I-can't-hear-yooouuu-la-la-la", when confronted with information that says what they are doing has problems. Not just techhies. That's fairly basic human nature.
This is pretty much the embodiment of Upton Sinclair's quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
For my part, I don't collect any data that I don't need; even if it makes it more difficult to do stuff like administer a server.
So they probably have developed the tool, and once developed been secretly compelled to use it.
My understanding is that Apple’s executives were surprised at the forcefulness of the opposition to their stand together with the meekness of public support.
(Having worked on private legislation, I get it. You work on privacy and like two people call their electeds because most people don’t care about privacy, while those who do are predominantly civically nihilists or lazy.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93FBI_encryption_d...
If Apple had simply had the text records, they would have had to comply with the government order to provide them.