> He had to go because of geopolitics due to US/China relations and the AI race.

Why? By all accounts everyone in the US loved him and thought he was the "le face of AI" or whatever. Would he have been ensnared in this scheme to smuggle chips to China if he hadn't slept with a Chinese spy who just happened to be a top exec at Megaspeed? If he didn't have this proclivity for affairs in the first place? The world may never know, but it can speculate.

He wasn't on great terms with Anthropic by most accounts.

If it does turn out that Jack Clark (Anthropic cofounder) was a major source behind this, the timing starts to get a bit suspect