TL;DR: We like money, and Anthropic should stay in a position to make loads of it despite any competition.
Up until a few years ago, if you wanted to sell a car as a non-Chinese company in China, you had to hand over pretty much everything to a local company and go into business with them.
When Google wanted to operate an uncensored search engine in China, they found themselves hacked.
It's not altogether unusual for IP to be transferred to Chinese manufacturers for production under a license agreement, then to find goods made with that IP to be for sale for far cheaper without payment made through the licensing agreement. Or maybe they just don't bother with a licensing agreement at all and do counterfeit products straight-up.
There are more examples but turnabout is ultimately fair play.
In a position to lose loads of money, maybe.
Even without China eating their lunch, there's zero reason to believe Anthropic will ever be profitable.
No amount of collusion can solve the core economics problem of compute.
Instead of each paying full price to generate a SOTA model in competition, they could share the result and split the cost. This gets even simpler if they merge.
you can say you're pre-revenue and you're a potential pure play