As much as it’s tempting to read some kind of ulterior motive into this, I think the most reasonable explanation is that AWS, as perhaps the single biggest point of failure in the backbone of US IT infrastructure, has legitimate concerns about its ability to fend off attacks from bad actors armed with the most advanced models.

Everyone is assuming this isn't a positive outcome for Anthropic. Think about the optics: everyone was shitting on Anthropic for silently downgrading Fable. Now that is forgotten, they have a chance to spend a week or two revising their approach, then will come out with a "Gov't approved" version and life goes on.

Most importantly, Anthropic has been too "uppity" and needed to be put in their place by the powers that be. Power hates disruption. Restrictions, control (and investment) are defenses against transformative tech. Amazon needs Anthropic to bend the knee for their investment to have long term value - the sooner the better.

It depends what the end goal may be.

If the end goal is that only regulated US companies can use Fable, that is a pretty good outcome for Amazon, and also for Jeff Bezos's new startup which aims to use AI to monopolize large industries that depend on advanced engineering in the physical world.

I think it's just to hype Anthropic. Check it out, we have products so dangerous the government banned them, we must be so advanced. (Their competitors cannot make such a claim.)

It's not ZDR so none of the megacorps are using it anyway. Microsoft already complained.

If you can't use it then might as well get rid of it.

In business, nothing's off limit to destroy others.

You can be better, or you can report them for any "illegal" stuff.

they figured out taking fable off plans at 22/6 was a bad idea business wise so they maneuvered

I would speculate that they were concerned, as many people familiar with frontier AI models are, that they are dangerous and could be misused to do bad things.