Guys like Paul Graham are a rare breed, a Hobbit-like optimist living in the equivalent of Mordor. When the political headwinds are strong, that type of hopecore content finds the right people and motivates legitimate change. If we still lived in 2009, then yeah, this would be a bizarre reaction to a national-scale business saying that we need to organize for a greater purpose.
But two decades have passed. I'm not going to enumerate everything that happened, but the US lost a lot of international standing in that time. We saw unprecedented protectionism, app store censorship, crypto/NFT celebrity scams, national-scale bribery, American annexation threats against NATO members; 10 years ago this would all be called parody by HN. We all watched neoliberalism get the Gallagher watermelon treatment.
This HN is the older and callous one. It's not a comfortable status-quo, but blaming the skepticism reveals a shocking blindness on many people's behalf. The problems with Anthropic and OpenAI today isn't the possibility of RSI, it's their political commitment to corruption, lies, hysteria and debt. The closed-door research only exists to impose an artificial authority that wouldn't exist if oversight committees and responsible disclosure was enforced by a trustworthy government. None of that is "cynical" to highlight, it's an objective development in America's national AI story.