What you think is reasonable and what they are gunning for can be very different things.

For instance, you can hear “their model is dangerous! Why would I want that?!”

Investors hear, “Their skunkworks stuff is so impossibly advanced that it’s basically a commercial wonder weapon in the waiting.”

And you might hear “We totally lost control and it hacked the Gibson, this technology needs regulation!” and think “Obviously full lockdown and government control.”

But friendly government actors might think, “Sounds like a good excuse to ban Chinese competition.”

Yeah, an extreme position is the typical opening move in this sort of game. Then you negotiate, walk back from the extreme, and meet somewhere in the middle.

The more extreme your opening demand, the greater the likelihood that the eventual equilibrium point will be closer to your actual target.

And in this case the actual target is to entrench the position of the current market leaders, and then effectively close the market to new entrants. That's itself a very extreme position, so the opener has to be even more extreme than that.

Reasonable to you, maybe, but the government wants Skynet, and OpenAI is willing to deliver it. Of course, we can't have every company wield such powerful and dangerous technology...