For 1: as a software company, they have a vested interest in ensuring that software engineers are as capable as possible. I don’t know if anthropic as a company uses this as a guiding principle, but certainly some companies do (ex Jane Street). So they might see this as more important than investment cycles.

The quality of software engineers and computer scientists I’ve seen coming out of undergraduate programs in the last year has been astonishingly poor compared to 2-3 years ago. I think it’s almost guaranteed that the larger companies have also noticed this.