It's part of the overall story.

The safeguards dropped are when they will release a model or not based on safety.

The Friday deadline is to allow to use their products for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons systems without a human in the loop.

Anthropic hasn't backed down on those, yet. But they are in a bad situation either way.

If they don't back down, they lose US government contracts, the government gets to do what it wants anyway. It also puts them in a dangerous position with non-governmental bodies.

If they give into the demands, then it puts all AI companies at risk of the same thing.

Personally I think they should move to the EU. The recent EU laws align with Anthropics thinking.