What is their other possible move here, considering the government is threatening to destroy their business entirely?

One alternative would be to call the government's bluff: if they truly are as indispensable as they claim then they can leverage that advantage into a deal.

But at a more general level, I'd say that unethical actions do not suddenly become ethical when one's business is at risk. If Anthropic considers that using their technology for X is unethical and then decide that their money and power is worth more than the lives of the foreigners that will be affected by doing X then good for them, but they shouldn't then make a grandstand about how hard they fought to ensure that only foreigners get their necks under the boots.