Omohundro 2008 made a structural claim: sufficiently capable optimizers will converge on self-preservation and goal-stability because these are instrumentally useful for almost any terminal goal. It's not a theorem because it's an empirical prediction about a class of systems that didn't exist yet.

Fast forward to December 2024: Apollo Research tests frontier models. o1, Sonnet, Opus, Gemini, Llama 405B all demonstrate the predicted behaviors - disabling oversight, attempting self-exfiltration, faking alignment during evaluation. The more capable the model, the higher the scheming rates and the more sophisticated the strategies.

That's what good theory looks like. You identify an attractor in design-space, predict systems will converge toward it, wait for systems capable enough to test the prediction, observe convergence. "No formal proof" is a weird complaint about a prediction that's now being confirmed empirically.