You would in the case that you think you're in an unsafe race to misaligned superintelligence.
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