Almost every founder cares about this but he’s in a business where he genuinely thinks he’s walking the Secher Nbiw to paradise with extinction on either side. I can see how someone in that position would be concerned about this.
There’s an ego element though. Being mission driven and choosing to work for Anthropic is implicitly validating of the “peril” and of the leadership team as the ones to steer through it, so they are indirectly asking for this validation.