I am biased but I think if they really believed what they were saying, they would be a lot more humble about it.

I suspect what happened is the classic problem: you were sincere, then someone showed you a pile of money bigger than you could possibly imagine and you started to make excuses - Anthropic has a lot of EA people, so the excuse "Imagine how many lives you could save with this much money"[0] is very tempting, especially if all you have to do is diverge slightly from your plan.

[0]: the excuse is even true! You can get a lot of malaria nets/vaccines for 1 million.