Seriously. It’s stupid talk to encourage regularity capture. If they were really afraid they were building a world ending device, they’d stop.
Write a thought. You’re not clever enough for a drive by gotcha
Is it? The push for the bomb was an international arms race — America against Russia. The race for AGI is an international arms race — America against China. The Manhattan Project members knew that what they were doing would have terrible consequences for the world but decided to forge ahead. It’s hard to say concretely what the leaders in AGI believe right now.
Ideology (and fear, and greed) can cause well meaning people to do terrible things. It does all the time. If Anthropic, OpenAI, etc. believed they had access to world ending technology they wouldn’t stop, they’d keep going so that the U.S. could have a monopoly on it. And then we’d need a chastened figure ala Oppenheimer to right the balance again.
Was it? US (and initially UK) didn't really face any real competition at all until the war was already over and they had the bomb. The Soviets then just stole American designs and iterated on top of them.