Anthropic has been slow at deploying their models at scale. For a very long period of time, it was virtually impossible to get access to their API for any serious work without making a substantial financial commitment. Whether that was due to safety concerns or simply the fact that their models were not cost-effective or scalable, I don't know. Today, we have many capable models that are not only on par but in many cases substantially better than what Anthropic has to offer. Heck, some of them are even open-source. Over the course of a year, Anthropic has lost some footing.
So of course, being a little late due to poorly executed strategy, they will be playing the status game now. Let's face it, though: these models are not more dangerous than Wikipedia or the Internet. These models are not custodians of ancient knowledge on how to cook Meth. This information is public knowledge. I'm not saying that companies like Anthropic don't have a responsibility for safeguarding certain types of easy access to knowledge, but this is not going to cause a humanity extinction event. In other words, the safety and alignment work done today resembles an Internet filter, to put it mildly.
Yes, there will be a need for more research in safety, for sure, but this is not something any company can do in isolation and in the shadows. People already have access to LLMs, and some of these models are as moldable as it gets. Safety and alignment have a lot to do with safe experimentation, and there is no better time to experiment safely than today because LLMs are simply not good enough to be considered dangerous. At the same time, they provide interesting capabilities to explore safety boundaries.
What I would like to see more of is not just how a handful of people make decisions on what is considered safe, because they simply don't know and will have blind spots like anyone else, but access to a platform where safety concerns can be explored openly with the wider community.