And company execs can hold strong principles and act to push companies in a certain direction because of them, although they are always acting within a set of constraints and conflicting incentives in the corporate environment and maybe not able to impose their direction as far as they would like. Anthropic's CEO in particular seems unusually thoughtful and principled by the standards of tech companies, although of course as you say even he may be pushed to take money from unsavory sources.
Basically it's complicated. 'Good guys' and 'bad guys' are for Marvel movies. We live in a messy world and nobody is pure and independent once they are enmeshed within a corporate structure (or really, any strong social structure). I think we all know this, I'm not saying you don't! But it's useful to spell it out.
And I agree with you that we shouldn't really trust any corporations. Incentives shift. Leadership changes. Companies get acquired. Look out for yourself and try not to tie yourself too closely to anyone's product or ecosystem if it's not open source.
To be fair, they also cooperate with the US government for immoral dragnet surveillance[0], and regularly assent to censorship (VPN bans, removed emojis, etc.) abroad. It's in both Apple and most governments' best interests to appear like mortal enemies, but cooperate for financial and domestic security purposes. Which for all intents and purposes, it seems they do. Two weeks after the San Bernardino kerfuffle, the iPhone in question was cracked and both parties got to walk away conveniently vindicated of suspicion. I don't think this is a moral failing of anyone, it's just the obvious incentives of Apple's relationship with their domestic fed. Nobody holds Apple's morality accountable, and I bet they're quite grateful for that.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...