This disaster of a PR strategy is not going to produce the outcomes Dario says he wants. It's going to make people hate him. Most importantly for his goals, it's going to make Chinese labs hate him--and they already hate him, because he treats them as basically terrorists. So if there is a "pacing", it won't include China, and thus may as well not happen.
That leaves only two conclusions, and really only one:
Dario believes what he says about safety, but does not understand politics and is prone to very counterproductive action, and therefore can't be trusted at the helm of a leading AI company.
or
Dario is lying about his goals, and therefore also can't be trusted.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Dario Amodei is a 40-something dude who is obviously very, very intelligent. But intelligence is not wisdom and his "essay" here can easily be read as someone who opened a can of worms and doesn't know (or can't accept) that he won't be able to put the worms back in. But he's going to try because he believes he owes it to humanity to try.
It's hubris in its most basic form, even if the guy who has it looks nice and wears shawl-collar sweaters.
God complex would be a pretty simple explanation.
Regulatory capture isn’t an “elaborate ruse.” For god’s sake, its Wikipedia page is 19 years old. I am not asking you to study political science or read Foucault.
If you are going to invoke Occam’s Razor, you can’t ignore the simplest explanation, which has a 19 year old entry on Wikipedia and over 100 years old historical precedence.
If they actually believed in it, then they would stop pushing the frontier of capability and instead focus on alignment, safety, and better tools for controlling/debugging AI. Then they would actually share their findings and tools.
They don't do this. Instead of reducing the competitive pressure and helping the industry to build safer more aligned models they are doing the exact opposite.
The x-risk stance and commercial stance have evolved to be the same thing - Anthropic must win, and then everything else seems to work backwards from that. Can you believe it, the path they think is best for x-risk involves them becoming filthy rich. And threats to their commercial dominance like distillation get framed in a way to turn them into x-risk concerns.