Sam Altman: "Development of superhuman machine intelligence (SMI) [1] is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity. " (https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1, published before he co-founded OpenAI)
Dario Amodei: "I think at the extreme end is the Nick Bostrom style of fear that an AGI could destroy humanity. I can’t see any reason and principle why that couldn’t happen." (https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/the-world-needs-ai-r..., published before he co-founded Anthropic)
Shane Legg: (responding to "What probability do you assign to the possibility of negative consequences, e.g. human extinction, as a result of badly done AI?") "...Maybe 5%, maybe 50%. I don't think anybody has a good estimate of this." (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/No5JpRCHzBrWA4jmS/q-and-a-wi...)
Technically Shane's quote is from 2011, which is a little bit after Deepmind was founded, but the idea that Shane in 2011 was trying to sow FUD in order to benefit from regulatory capture is... lol.
I wish I knew why they think the math pencils out for what they're doing, but Sam Altman was not plotting regulatory capture 9 years ago, nearly a year before OpenAI got started.