Sam saw Anthropic was getting too competitive. So he called his buddies in the gov to knock them down a peg.

That's very possible! In the last few days Anthropic was getting a lot of attention, and OpenAI was looking weaker in comparison. It seems like a politically coordinated job to remove competition.

For sure, he's been pissed that OpenAI no longer has the Mandate of Heaven and Claude is all anyone has been talking about since December. (And it's not just an ego thing: because OAI isn't profitable yet, they need the hype to keep going to raise money on favorable terms, so loss of buzz is an existential threat). I absolutely believe that he started making calls to try and get buddies in the White House to take Anthropic down.