I'm fairly certain Amodei believes the "too dangerous to release" hype himself. Even if it's just an incremental improvement, better than getting frog-boiled by repeated 20% improvements until someone builds bioweapons in their backyard.
* sigh *
Three things:
* Delaying the release accomplishes nothing.
* The barrier to someone building/not-building a bioweapon in their backyard is not access to an LLM.
* Remember when GPT 3.5 was going to destroy the world? And how it was conscious? And how it was "trying to escape"? Lmao.
He's made so many statements that fall under the "boy who cried wolf" category that even if he _does_ believe these statements he needs to be managed better. I'll never forget Anthropic's huge "Oh my God, the AI blackmailed a researcher to save itself!" and the prompt effectively told the AI to do that and gave it forged emails with easy blackmail targets, as if this isn't a common trope in mystery or suspense books/television/fanfiction, all of which Claude (and others) have been trained on.