Well they're doing a pretty poor job of guiding it in a positive direction and ethically speaking they are almost indistinguishable from the bad actors....
I think the direction has been pretty positive so far. Models are getting better, and things seem to be roughly fine. That, of course, might change in the future.
Everyone is acting badly to some considerable degree, but I find it fairly easy to distinguish between US model labs and North Korea.
Do you now? Remember the girls school bombing in Iran, of which we still don't know if an AI agent was involved in the target planning?
I do unterstand why a (assuming here) US citizen might sleep all sound and comfy, but to the rest of the world the distinction is neither as clear nor as comforting.
As a European, all I know is that we cannot trust the USA anymore, and being so utterly dependent on them to not fuck up the most important technological revolution in our history so far over greed, cronyism, incompetence... it is terrifying.
When you are running black weapons programs in broad daylight you are now guilty by default on one of two of the prongs of Hanlon's Razor, and I don't care which they prefer to hang for as long as they hang.
Sure Anthropic is not perfect. But it's a coordination problem. They're in a race and safety/restraint is a handicap. That's why they're begging for regulation (and just get accused of attempting regulatory capture.) Why isn't there another lab outcompeting Anthropic on safety? They all died because the market can't support it.
Certainly the industry deserves criticism, but if you really want to change it you're better off changing the incentives.