honest question - could have this be avoided even if you ignore American accelerationism? IMO once the transformers paper was published and we learned that LLMs can read code the arms race became inevitable.

The only way it could be avoided is if the world had an effective cooperation framework _before_ the tool was discovered but we're still in developmental infancy in that regard. You can argue that this accelerationism makes things worse but I don't think you can argue that it's causal.