This whole thing is sorta blown out of context; but it does make explosive journalism, sell a bunch of ad revenue, and give Anthropic a lot of publicity (whom I think is just amoral here).

The bottom line is in the past the US government has acquired weapons/tech with deals like "it will never be used for X purpose". However, as far as my research has shown, it has never accepted deal where said weapons or tech has self-policing features. For instance, a bomb that would refused to explode over US soil or something like that.

And it makes sense why they would refuse such deals, as it would be a security risk, or a system that could be exploited against them by an enemy.

Of course that does not make great headlines. And given the current administration and how news headlines are written these days, it makes sense this is the way this whole thing went down.