Wouldn't that be extremely intrusive as to allow them to hold millions of American passports info on their DBs for an uncontrolled amount of time?

They might well do that, but that takes a lot of time and money to implement, meaning that the government’s goal of causing them immediate pain for minimal effort is still achieved.

It’s likely a better use of anthropic’s resources to try to get the export controls lifted by appeasing the government. I’m not saying that’s a good thing; it’s a stupid situation to be in in the first place for reasons many others in this thread have pointed out.