I guess the argument they have is if you have someone suffering today and $10,000 will end their suffering, longtermist EA’s will argue that $10k should be spent on AI alignment research because theoretically AI could end human life & theoretically there could be trillions more humans if that doesn’t happy so trillions of lives > 1 life (valuing existing and future lives the same). I don’t subscribe to this view but it does exist and ‘harming people today’ to make ‘the future go well’ is a vocal minority within EA.