How to understand Anthropic

 Anthropic’s Safety Superpower - Ben Thompson, Stratechery 

The company really believes that they are the only ones who believe in super intelligence, and thus are the only ones who are sufficiently concerned about the dangers. That excuses decision after decision, policy after policy, and confrontation after confrontation that, to people on the outside, look like a bizarre combination of cynicism and naiveté.

Anthropic, [in contrast to OpenAI], has perfect alignment between talent and mission and business. The company gets to sell to researchers the creation of a machine god, with the mantle of being the sort of person who cares about the dangers and is smart enough to navigate them on behalf of humanity; that every policy change that falls out of that happens to be great for business is the most beautiful coincidence in the world. 

The history of brilliant people convinced they know what humanity needs is a sordid one, precisely because they have convinced themselves that their intentions are good, justifying actions that very much are not.