And on the other side this is the foreign adversarial way to hinder US AI progress, develop and encourage anti-datacenter sentiment which this kind of secrecy and antidemocratic behavior plays right into.
Is it really a matter of "national security" when the technology at hand is being used in a way that unilaterally benefits a small class of oligarchs at the expense of the rest of society? That's not really in the benefit of the nation anymore, is it?
Depends on what you think "the nation" is. Is it the "regular people"? Or is it the elite? (And whichever you think it is, and no matter how obvious you think it is, there are people who think it is obviously the opposite.)