I don't know why you think I'm taking anything literally, cf. my first comment. I understand what a metaphorical arms race is. I don't think that Anthropic can forestall others' AI development by getting there first. It can't be literal destruction. It can't be economic destruction (some actors interested in it aren't motivated by money). What's left? I'm all ears.

As far as naivete, wouldn't it be more naive to take their EA claims at face value, rather than the more realistic assumption that they like money?

Creative destruction is absolutely a thing in the market, but the way things are going it seems more likely that open source models will just destroy everything else as far as most users are concerned. The big proprietary labs will be effectively left with Fable, GPT-Pro and Gemini Deep Research - stuff that by all indications needs very large scale compute to even feasibly run. We'll probably find out that each has its own strengths, weaknesses and viable niches, so there's no reason to expect any of those models to utterly destroy the others. They can all survive as specialty services.