Everyone I know who works at Anthropic genuinely believes in safety and has deep concerns about the potential existential impact of AI; the "they are just hucksters pretending to care about it so they can run a scam" point of view isn't at all close to reality.
But, granting it for the sake of argument, yeah, they're clearly failing there: if other companies are able to outcompete them on the regulatory capture front, then if that's their strategy then they're losing.
But, granting it for the sake of argument, yeah, they're clearly failing there: if other companies are able to outcompete them on the regulatory capture front, then if that's their strategy then they're losing.