My most generous interpretation of Anthropic's flirting with it is they too think it would be a nightmare and are hyper-vigilant. (My more realistic interpretation is that it's just some mix of a Frankenstein complex and hype-boosting.)
That said, the cynic in me thinks they give lip service to these things while pushing fully ahead into the unknown on the presumption of glory and a possibility of abundance. A bunch of the leadership are EAs who subscribe to a kind of superintelligence eschatology that goes as far as to give a shot at their own immortality. Given that, I think they act on the assumption that AGI is a necessity, and they'd rather take the risks on everyone's behalf than just not create the technology in the first place.
Them recently flirting with money from the gulf states is a pretty concerning signal pointing to them being more concerned with their own goals rather than ethics.