I was at Google when it pulled out of China. GP's post reminds me a lot of early Google - it wasn't evil because there were people in high places, who were critical to its operations, who cared deeply about doing the right thing, and as a result other people who cared about doing the right thing felt like they had cover, and people who were willing to do the wrong thing to hit a short-term number found that they were marginalized. It changed slowly, one departure at a time, as the wrong people got into positions of power and started providing cover to people willing to do the wrong thing. A lot of it also had to do with declining market power: when Google was universally on top, they felt like they could do the right thing without serious negative consequences, but when they were fighting for control of a market, they felt they had to make compromises lest some other firm (being honest: Facebook) would end up in power and do the wrong thing anyway.

Unfortunately there doesn't really seem to be a cure for institutional decay. Once unethical people get in power, they hire other unethical people, and then you're just stuck in Game of Thrones. You have to go quit and found another company, and single-mindedly keep all those people away, kinda like Anthropic did when they left OpenAI.

Yeah, I lean towards the structure not being the cause of the outcome here (i.e. if you rotated the governance structure of Anthropic and OpenAI, I think the decisions at each would likely stay the same).

If they made that decision and it destroyed revenue, I could see an alternate timeline where a standard C-Corp + board with non-founder control may have ousted leadership. But that wasn't the situation for OpenAI or Google either, and their leadership still made a different decision.