I don't think it's that complicated. Anthropic's business model from the start was to brand themselves as the safe/responsible AI company. The whole idea was that eventually society and government would see the dangers of AI and regulate it, at which point the company which had invested the most in safety would pull ahead. The sooner Anthropic can have society and government come to this realization, the sooner they can reap the benefit of all their safety/alignment investment.

Two other factors:

- The employee base and C-suite are mostly true believers in the need for AI safety. It would be organizationally very challenging to pivot, even if financial interest was pushing that way.

- Anthropic is registered as a public benefit corporation, so that even if they IPO they don't have the fiduciary duty to shareholders that most people are familiar with for public companies. They still need massive revenue to stay solvent, but they can optimize for things other than pure profit.