[ben_w]

While I also regard the "doom from the companies themselves is just a marketing stunt" arguments as conspiracy-theory territory (especially since neither OpenAI nor Anthropic* changed their tune since before they were rich enough for meaningful lobbying):

This particular specific doom is from the USG, Trump has a history of kayfabe, and there's a stink of market manipulation coming from the White House.

* Musk, however, you can totally have: "With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon" in 2014 to "if I go ahead and build this enormous robot army, can I just be ousted at some point in the future?" in 2025.

[watwut]

So, assuming they are moderately sane is "conspiracy theory"?

Assuming they are evil unsane and actually believe that crap while doing what they do looks way more like conspiracy theory.

[ben_w]

> So, assuming they are moderately sane is "conspiracy theory"?

Every time I've met someone who believes a conspiracy theory, they don't realise how not-sane the conspiracy they propose is.*

Founding a company on the basis you don't think the others are safe enough, raising capital on that basis, developing methods to improve AI safety, publishing literature about your methods, making open calls for legislation for safety standards, etc.?

While also managing to not leak documentation of this despite all the staff who did leave in order to openly speak about the stuff that they thought still wasn't safe enough?

Thinking that all the doom-talk from OpenAI and Anthropic** is just a PR technique even though they maintained this position continuously starting before they had any money or offices is about as sensible as thinking 9/11 was an insurance scam.

* by definition, because if they did they wouldn't believe it; actual conspiracies can of course be insane, but a conspiracy theory has to also justify why the "evidence" of conspiracy consists of people saying "I recon" rather than documents (specifically documents that mean what they think they mean, cf. "Mike's Nature trick").

** Again, just those two. I'm absolutely not fully generalising this, I'm absolutely not saying there's zero people who do as you say. Heck, the mere fact that this is a common talking point practically guarantees someone post-ChatGPT saw all the people claiming it was PR and said to themselves "great idea I'll do that".

[watwut]

They raised money on the basis of replacing labor by cheaper AI. Not on the basis of being more safe then nebulous "others". They are not "safe" and do nothing to make world safer or better.

> Founding a company on the basis you don't think the others are safe enough, raising capital on that basis, developing methods to improve AI safety, publishing literature about your methods, making open calls for legislation for safety standards, etc.?

These are marketing claims. Or self-delusion claims.

> Thinking that all the doom-talk from OpenAI and Anthropic is just a PR technique even though they maintained this position continuously starting before they had any money or offices i

Continuing to maintain self-aggrandizing position that makes investors give you money is not proof that you are genuine.

But, if they are genuine, then maybe they should stop trying to make that doom happen as fast as possible. I just dont see how "they are really trying to cause maximal harm to maximum amount of people" is a defense.

[ben_w]

> They raised money on the basis of replacing labor by cheaper AI. Not on the basis of being more safe then nebulous "others". They are not "safe" and do nothing to make world safer or better.

Original founding says otherwise, for both OpenAI (famously) and Anthropic with this in a copy of their certificate of incorporation I found:

  ARTICLE III
  The specific public benefit that the Corporation will promote is to responsibly develop and maintain advanced Al for the cultural, social and technological improvement of humanity. In addition, the Corporation may engage in any lawful act or activity for which corporations may be organized under the Delaware General Corporation Law as the same exists or may hereafter be amended (the "DGCL.").

- Jan 2021: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1f7mYsm4px4pPdIzYo64wGePVNEH...

Immediate thing they did? Spend one year training a model, then a second year safety-testing it.

> These are marketing claims. Or self-delusion claims.

It's published reproducible work. Early-stage stuff you could get away with calling "self-delusion", that doesn't fly when papers get published, sometimes on topics that can be described as "AI do X, which is bad, can we make them not?" e.g https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.13548, https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.10162, https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.10965, https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18397 from Anthropic and https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.16339 from OpenAI.

> Continuing to maintain self-aggrandizing position that makes investors give you money is not proof that you are genuine.

Conspiracies and growing businesses are incompatible with not getting caught.

A conspiracy of 2 is easy to hide. How big did Facebook get before we saw their dirty laundry?

> I just dont see how "they are really trying to cause maximal harm to maximum amount of people" is a defense.

With that in quotations, you seem to be arguing backwards from what you think they're doing.

Their actual arguments are much the same as open source software: with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.

This is obviously true. It may not be sufficient, there's plenty of other doomers who say it isn't sufficient, but it is true.

Easy way to demonstrate, is the difference with the armchair philosophising before LLMs vs. what we see now they exist:

We had decades of people claiming the "obvious" way to keep superhuman intelligence safe is to keep it in a box, keep it offline. Every one of those discussions I've been in, the person saying this refused to believe that it was possible for an AI to convince humans to let it out of the box.

Real life? Blake Lemoine violates his NDA and hires a lawyer on behalf of an LLM, after the LLM convinced him with arguments that a lot of other people (justifiably) mocked him for believing. LaMDA was not superhuman, and it still convinced him.

Did this immediately stop people saying we can keep AI in a box and just not let it out? Nope, kept hearing that for another year or two. That's how much experience humanity collectively needed to internalise just that one part of "AI is more dangerous than you think it is".

[watwut]

> Conspiracies and growing businesses are incompatible with not getting caught.

Growing business is super compatible with lying to make yourself sound better to investors. How is this one an argument? It is not even a conspiracy, just a normal CEO behavior at this point.

Also, what safety testing seriously? It is not like Chinese models were more unsafe in any realistic way.

And it is not like there wpuld be any real attempts to make humanity better.

I dont kmow what you are on about offline AI and someone not keeping corporate secrets. Or antropomorphised ai with conscoiusness hiring layer by proxy.

Who cares?

[lstodd]

Do not assume people are sane for any definition of sane. That way lies the madness.