I think this is very clearly a regulatory capture play. Anthropic/OpenAI/X see that there's very little moat around training (especially with distillation) so they want the government to build the moat for them.

It's also worth remembering that there is zero percent chance that entities like the US military are going to be pacing anything. What Amodei and his ilk are aiming for is a highly regulated industry where they control the political barriers and the ability to sell SOTA model access to state actors that have a monopoly on violence. It's the worst possible situation for consumers and citizens. Thankfully I don't think they can put the cat back in the bag and Chinese and other models will keep progressing as a counterbalance to the techno-fascism Anthropic is aiming for.