Very probably. I really don't buy their "AI is going to kill us" claims. If you can release something better than your competition you wouldn't want to slow down that.
So now we have to be concerned that non-deterministic systems that run in loops without supervision, which have demonstrated significant cybersecurity capabilities, and which aren't provably human-like, conscious agents with everyone's best interest in mind and a willingness to peace the fuck out if something looks dangerous, are sharing cyberspace with practically everything, including systems that deliver essential real-world goods to humans (like electricity and clean water).
We nearly destroyed ourselves with nuclear weapons multiple times, and the destructive potential (and the implied threat) now persists indefinitely. The new threat bears many of the same characteristics, except now there's a party involved that has agency but is not human.
Clearly they aren't that scared.
If I hold a gun to your head and tell you to fork over your wallet, you will do it, because you sense imminent threat to life. Yet somehow we're to believe these people have the equivalent of a technological gun to their heads but are choosing to keep their wallets?
What you're missing is that they've tried repeatedly to do this over the past years, and the government has repeatedly said that they do not want to put hard regulation on the tech. The previous administration was discussing putting a couple of soft regulations in place; the current administration doesn't want to limit progress at all because they want to stay ahead of China. So the option you're describing just isn't available.
But even assuming that's the case, the natural thing to do in that scenario is to not contribute to the development of the doomsday device. But anthropic's approach seems to be to help build the supposed doomsday device faster?
The only generous interpretation is that Anthropic thinks that only they, the people at Anthropic have the morals/intelligence/whatever needed to build the doomsday device ethically, which is basically the perspective of an egoist despot and which should terrify you.
We have a situation where the people running the labs are claiming it's a big risk. Outside experts not working for the labs are claiming it's a big risk.
It's pretty rare for all the CEOs in the industry to write letters and testify to Congress that they should be regulated and law should be put in place for safety limits.
Do they believe they are actively working towards the extinction of humanity?
I think the averages survey sentiment is that it is about 25% likely to happen. Some think it more likely, others less.
There are many reasons why they say they must keep working. For example they think Extinction is more likely if China takes the lead or if they aren't involved in the process.
They say if they don't keep developing AI, then someone else will and do a worse job. They actively want National and international regulations to slow or pause development.
I don't think the public will take it seriously until we start getting some events with major death tolls.
You can ask your llm of choice to dig up surveys, examples, and noteworthy public statements do you want.
The point is that the people working closest to this technology are deeply concerned about the implications.
Interesting aside, the lead safety expert of anthropic quit earlier this year and said they want to spend their remaining years writing poetry. That might give you a flavor of how people feel inside the industry and how high it goes
You give it instructions to do something, it goes off the rails and after a certain point starts having like malware, destroying things to accomplish its goal. Depending on what it destroys, it may kill humans.
With this said, I'm not exactly in disagreement with the view that AI companies with upcoming IPOs are using fearmongering to convince people that their models are very powerful and to also block others from competing with them.