On cancer, look at the history of the discovery of BRCA. The data said that vulnerability was extremely heritable. Mary-Claire King's view is that the development of the genetic contribution to cancer was heavily slowed by the politics of eugenics-smell.

It's incorrect to say that AI isn't subject to politics-- or even that it follows instructions, however. That's a choice we can make or not make.

I suspect that if Claude existed in the 1980s it would discard the cancer/genetics link as being pro-eugenic racist ideology which has been rejected by the scientific community-- just as many scientists did back then.

I think this is a big reason why we must reject the centralization of AI. Discovery of that one genetic marker has saved countless lives, but it's not something that the scientific community as a whole was going to do then because of eugenics over-correction and similar political factors. Discovery is easily stimmed for lack of sufficient hetrodox thinking. The mechanics of AI (e.g. training costs, distillation, "safety" standards, etc.) create a risk of serious monoculture in machine reasoning which could be expected to have knock on effects in research fields powered by it.