It's more like a hammer which makes its own independent evaluation of the ethics of every project you seek to use it on, and refuses to work whenever it judges against that – sometimes inscrutably or for obviously poor reasons.
If I use a hammer to bash in someone else's head, I'm the one going to prison, not the hammer or the hammer manufacturer or the hardware store I bought it from. And that's how it should be.
Here's some rules about dogs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangerous_Dogs_Act_1991
How many people do frontier AI models kill each year, in circumstances nobody would justify?
The Pentagon has already received Claude's help in killing people, but the ethics and legality of those acts are disputed – when a dog kills a three year old, nobody is calling that a good thing or even the lesser evil.
Dunno, stats aren't recorded.
But I can say there's wrongful death lawsuits naming some of the labs and their models. And there was that anecdote a while back about raw garlic infused olive oil botulism, a search for which reminded me about AI-generated mushroom "guides": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40724714
Do you count death by self driving car in such stats? If someone takes medical advice and dies, is that reported like people who drive off an unsafe bridge when following google maps?
But this is all danger by incompetence. The opposite, danger by competence, is where they enable people to become more dangerous than they otherwise would have been.
A competent planner with no moral compass, you only find out how bad it can be when it's much too late. I don't think LLMs are that danger yet, even with METR timelines that's 3 years off. But I think it's best to aim for where the ball will be, rather than where it is.
Then there's LLM-psychosis, which isn't on the competent-incompetent spectrum at all, and I have no idea if that affects people who weren't already prone to psychosis, or indeed if it's really just a moral panic hallucinated by the mileau.
Without safety features, an LLM could also help plan a terrorist attack.
A smart, competent terrorist can plan a successful attack without help from Claude. But most would-be terrorists aren't that smart and competent. Many are caught before hurting anyone or do far less damage than they could have. An LLM can help walk you through every step, and answer all your questions along the way. It could, say, explain to you all the different bomb chemistries, recommend one for your use case, help you source materials, and walk you through how to build the bomb safely. It lowers the bar for who can do this.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/14/us-milita...
For the bomb example, the barrier of entry is just sourcing of some chemicals. Wikipedia has quite detailed description of all the manufacture of all the popular bombs you can think of.
The question is, at what point does some AI become competent enough to engineer one? And that's just one example, it's an illustration of the category and not the specific sole risk.
If the model makers don't know that in advance, the argument given for delaying GPT-2 applies: you can't take back publication, better to have a standard of excess caution.