Yes, there is nuance. And, I have a Claude subscription partly because they showed more hesitation to provide surveillance tools for spying on US citizens than other vendors. They are not wholly free of ties to the US regime, but they've been better than others.

But, I'll come back to "two things can be true". Anthropic is better than some, and in some regards they are navigating a complicated ethical landscape with more care than others. On the other hand, it really looks like they're angling to regulate their open competitors out of the game and one of the tools for doing that is to make claims about safety; Anthropic models are safe and restricted to use by entities they deem safe, open models are not safe because anybody can use them and also who knows what those Chinese people are putting in their models.

And again, this also has nuance, models, including the Chinese open models, could be adversarial and we may not know it. Anthropic proved models can be a risk by sabotaging Fable briefly, causing it to produce bad results based on what the model thought it was being used for. This is why I tend to take Anthropic's words with a grain of salt. They're literally doing the unsafe things they say are risks of open models, while still laying claim to the "safe AI company" mantle.