I'll concede that a lot (most?) of the problems are not technically the responsibility of the AI labs to address, and it wouldn't entirely be their fault for our government failing to get ahead of the problem. Mass unemployment, for example, is nearly 100% a political problem.

That being said, I can't help but experience a bit of Deja Vu over arguments like those around biorisk. I've seen the same exact things said in the early 2000s over widespread access to broadband and Google. When the anarchist cookbook spread around online and everyone was super paranoid about democratized terrorism, and we had big regulatory pushes for ISP level censorship and user tracking. Telecoms frequently argued that only they can keep the web safe, with strict and expensive regulations that naturally only those large heavily capitalized companies can afford to go through. Like the early internet and search, its just another way to lower the latency required for a human to find already existing public data

Well, very little of that played out. Turns out the math, for now, is the same, and information retrieval doesn't directly correlate to democratized weaponization. In 2001, a bad actor still needed a physical lab, precursor chemicals, etc to build a physical threat. Those same exact physical constraints exist today. The software cannot yet cross the digital-to-physical divide.

Keep an eye on the risk, by all means, but I don't see it yet as justification to cement a monopoly or oligopoly, nor do I see it as a reason to prioritize a risk of information availability over the climate and environmental risks that are far more likely to end the species.