This is marketing.

1. Release fable, highly nerfed and limited 2. See the compute capacity limiter pegged day after day 3. Lobby to the government, claiming ai is super unsafe and not aligned and they must do something 4. Government "forces" anth to turn off 5. Anth takes the pressure off of compute capacity, and gets to blame it on the govt

Like you're telling me fable is somehow an order of magnitude better than GPT 5.5 to the point where it compromises national security, despite evals and anecdotes saying otherwise? Nah.

You're saying a company's marketing department can casually get the United States Government to issue a national security passage, preventing sale or distribution of their product?

Was their ongoing designation as a "supply chain risk", which they are suing to overturn in court, also a marketing stunt?

Seems like a really strange thing to use that sort of power for - why not just get all your competition declared persona non-grata and seize monopoly power?

Yes, it's marketing straight out of the Big Tobacco playbook. Convince everyone your product is dangerous, get government to ban it, and then... uh... pivot into adjacent market segments?