There's an obvious coordination problem here: if you decide to stop your research for safety and your competitors don't, you have just burned your company without actually improving the world's outcomes. There's also an obvious solution to this problem: convince the government to force both you and your competitors to pay more attention to safety. Anthropic is doing that.
If you do something evil because "others will do it if I don't, so it may as well be me", you are a bad person. So that isn't exactly a compelling defense of what Anthropic is doing. They are either insincere (because they don't actually believe AI is dangerous), or evil (because they do believe it but keep making it anyway). There is no middle ground here.