Their thesis may well be right but this example is completely wrong:

> Stockfish has a clear goal, and it consistently and relentlessly pursues this goal. Nothing the other player does can cause Stockfish to drop this goal; no interaction will cause Stockfish to “go easy” on the other player in the name of fairness, mercy, or any other goal. (All of this is fairly obvious in the case of a chess AI, but it’s worth noting explicitly because there’s a greater temptation to anthropomorphize AI systems and assume they have human-like goals when the AI is capable of more general human behaviors, is tasked with imitating humans, etc.)

In fact this IS anthropomorphization: "has a clear goal, and it consistently and relentlessly pursues this goal" -- nope, Stockfish has no goals, is not "relentless", and does not pursue anything.

Stockfish is a chess engine, which is an evaluator; given a position (a chess state) it produces a numerical evaluation of each move that can be made in the position, ranked from highest to lowest. That's all -- it is otherwise passive; it has no goals of any sort. It is simply programmed to evaluate moves and give them numeric scores (by recursively evaluating a position tree using alpha-beta pruning and other standard chess engine techniques, including machine learning and neural networks).

Around that one can write a simple executive that maintains the state of the chess board and makes the move with the highest Stockfish evaluation -- people often confuse this wrapper with the Stockfish engine but they are independent. Such a simple loop is hardly a pursuer of a goal--it achieves the goal of playing near-optimal chess because the evaluator is very effective at ranking moves by how good they are, but there's no goal-seeking behavior or mechanism beyond that.

As for going easy -- chess.com has a raft of wrappers (that they call "bots") that call Stockfish but do not always play the move with the best evaluation ... these "bots" give a player a selection of strength -- weak players can select the weaker ones and strong players can select the stronger ones. By not playing the best move, these wrappers very much "go easy" on the players. These "bots" achieve the goal of playing bad/mediocre/good chess via algorithms that select moves that aren't the best, but there's no goal-seeking behavior or mechanism beyond that. But notice that an "artificial intelligence", if one wants to call these that (and it is a choice, not a law of nature), can in fact "go easy" on people.

All that said, there ARE "relentless" systems with goal-driven behavior -- it's just the example that is quite poor (and sloppy and ignorant and undercuts the thesis).