Over the last several months, the two leading frontier AI labs have shown some brazen behavior.

It started with a series of ​ carefully planned announcements​ and reports from OpenAI that try to establish how unnerving and powerful (not to mention ​felonious​ ) their LLM-powered agent systems have become.

They then handed the baton to Anthropic, whose employees began ​publicly debating​ the exact probability that these technologies would lead to human extinction. They delivered this all with an eerie calmness that conveyed a nihilistic inevitability about their work.

The ground suitably softened, the campaign crescendoed with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodi releasing a letter, titled ​“We Must Pace the Frontier,”​ in which he enumerates all the harms his own company’s research might cause , and then, instead of apologizing and promising to stop, concludes that catastrophe can only be avoided if we “build the technology in the right way,” which involves – surprise, surprise – the government slowing down…