The absurdity to claim that Anthropic is strong-arming the DoD and forcing them to do anything when just the other day it was reported that the DoD was threatening this exact action if Anthropic didn't comply with their demands is laughable.
It feels like a pretty low bar to clear to tell this orange fuck to piss off, but at least one of the AI companies has a spine.
I'm no expert, but I feel like a data center in space is a super niche use case. Bandwidth seems like it would be a major issue. Heat seems like it would as well. And as you said, jurisdiction would be a problem that many businesses wouldn't necessarily want to contend with.
While the devices are difficult to get to physically, should an adversarial state actor send something up, it's not like we could stop them from accessing the devices in a way we could if they were within the borders of a country. They're harder to reach for smaller adversaries, and significantly easier for bigger ones. Not to mention significantly harder for us to repair if something goes wrong.
I'm not saying data centers in space are a bad idea in general, but I am not seeing a huge benefit to them right now.