See printing press and internet!
And to your point. Don Quixote, the first modern and greatest novel of all times, is about a guy that lost touch with reality from reading too many books
The point is, it should give you at least some pause when the people most familiar with a technology are among those making the strongest statements about its potential dangers. Extrapolation has worked extremely well in predicting what AI will be capable of over the past 5 years; how confident are you that it will fail before we reach apocalyptic scenarios?
People at anthropic don’t have any secret that many people outside already have. Again the burden of proof is on the person making a claim. That you feel concerned or scared doesn’t grant you special privileges to control or dictate a transforming technology.
The motivations aren't unique here. Restrictions on the development of almost any technology benefits incumbents by providing a moat.
If your only evidence that the claim "ai dangerous - regulate ai" is true is "insiders who stand to make billions if they can regulate away the competition" told me so, that is pretty weak evidence indeed.
If a group of concerned scientists (without $$$ in stock options) demonstrated that anyone with one year of HS chemistry, an Amazon account, and a ChatGPT max plan could build a bioweapon 10x more lethal than an AR15 mass shooting or driving a truck into a crowd (because it is certainly more than 10x harder to make a bioweapon than either of these things, even with a theoretical AGI), then that would be worrisome. This is really not that high of an evidence bar but even it has not been met, but oh no we should start regulating yesterday.