Arguably, it was Anthropic's decision to abide by their Government's orders. They could have not done so, but that would likely have consequences they weren't willing to face.
I choose to follow the law, but it’s an obligation not a decision. Framing it like this just misses the big picture entirely. A few words from a tech CEO is all it takes for this government to take extreme measures like this.
Viewing it as an obligation means you are weak. There are consequences to disobeying the law - a successful person will view them through the lens of cost-benefit analysis, not of dogma.
At the end of the day it's not really a decision at all, the government has a lot of men with guns, Anthropic has (presumably) low numbers to zero of men with guns.
You don't really have a choice if the government decides to play hardball
There are other things that can happen. For example, Anthropic could secretly transfer a copy of the model to a Chinese company in exchange for a large sum of yuan at a Chinese bank. Both parts of the transaction would be invisible to US authorities. I don't think this is a likely occurrence but if you think it's impossible then you need to think outside the box more.
The tech billionaires won't let such a ban stand. They may not GAF about random Latinos being deported from a field in Texas, but they won't simply give up people like Andrej Karpathy.
Jared Kushner will get a sweet package of private Anthropic shares and everything will be forgotten.
10x? More like 1000x. EU doesn't have a chance except providing training for those talent only to be then aquired by US tech behemoths paying them what they are actually worth