With the reality-bending financial incentives that these people have, I simply do not trust your or anyone else's assessment of the genuineness of their beliefs. And anyway, it's quite ironic that from godless San Francisco of all places, we are supposed to simply accept that the harmful acts of religious extremists are justified because, well, they do believe in their cause.

If I were building a technology that I thought posed a risk of exterminating the human race I would simply stop building it. But what do I know, I'm not a genius AI researcher.

> genuinely do believe AI poses a potential existential threat to humanity; every single one that I know personally believes that. This has been pointed out hundreds of times, and to simply dismiss it as marketing hype by crypto bros to increase IPO valuations long ago passed into the realm of conspiracy thinking.

"They are not in a thought bubble YOU are in the thought bubble"

I am absolutely BTFO'd, you got me.

people at Anthropic (and OpenAI, for that matter!) really, genuinely do believe

The same could have been said (and has been said) about other tech company employees for all sorts of other reasons in alignment with those companies' goals. Don't you remember how much people used to laugh at Tesla employees for worshipping Elon Musk as some kind of god of engineering and entrepreneurial genius? Or Apple employees in the Steve Jobs reality distortion field?

I would have thought at this point that it'd be well known that the employees of all cult-like tech companies can't be trusted to make a sober evaluation of their companies' justified valuation. We can talk about conflicts of interest and we'd barely be getting started! How about biased selection by hiring managers for the most fervent believers in the company's mission from the get-go?