Anthropic had countless ways to fight this and they chose to cave.

The government can't apply export controls based on a control that does not exist. Creating one for model inference, if at all possible, would take 3-6 months at a minimum and it even includes a public comment process. That control is not cited anywhere because it does not exist.

The president can invoke emergency powers but that requires pointing to a specific foreign threat, notifying congress formally, posting on the national register, and it only lasts six months unless congress votes to renew it.

Given how easy it would have been for them to fight this, we can only conclude this was either outright designed or incredibly convenient for Anthropic.

Given their stated goal of pulling Fable by June 22nd, it seems likely they underestimated the amount of compute they would need or, even if they had perfectly estimated it, pivoting so that "the government shut it down because it's so powerful" on June 12nd is a better story than "we shut it down because we lack the compute" on the 22nd. This is especially true because the net new revenue from Fable is just from new signups between the two dates, which is likely smaller each day elapsed since the launch.