There's a simpler explanation than "billionaires with hearts of gold" here. If:

(1) this is a wildly unpopular and optically bad deal

(2) it's a high data rate deal--lots of tokens means bad things for Anthropic. Users which use their product heavily are costing more than they pay.

(3) it's a deal which has elements that aren't technically feasible, like LLM powered autonomous killer robots...

then it makes a whole lot of sense for Anthropic to wiggle out of it. Doing it like this they can look cuddly, so long as the Pentagon walks away and doesn't hit them back too hard.