I think you’re 100% right, and boy, this piece made me big mad. Yet another outlet breathlessly publishing fucking nonsense for a ghoul, who by uncritically publishing said ghoul’s dire warning of the imminent birth of a superintelligent malign(?) entity, serves as his unpaid marketing firm. Axios should be embarrassed. If anyone who wasn’t the head of an LLM company spouted this drivel, they’d be locked away in a padded room and Axios would rightly be called out for exacerbating the mental health crisis of a paranoid schizophrenic.

The whole essay reads like, “Here at Anthropic, we’re doing our best to create the Torment Nexus, but if anybody else were to successfully create the Torment Nexus, that would represent an existential risk for humanity. We’re doing our best to create it first, so please give us more money to save humanity.” It would be utter lunacy if he actually believed it.