In 2015, about a year before ever founding OpenAI, Sam Altman wrote:
"Development of superhuman machine intelligence (SMI) is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity. There are other threats that I think are more certain to happen (for example, an engineered virus with a long incubation period and a high mortality rate) but are unlikely to destroy every human in the universe in the way that SMI could."
I mean, Terminator the movie came out in the 80's... I'm sure if LLM-based AIs posed this kind of threat the government would quietly force all the vendors to cooperate and slow down.
Google, MS, IBM are all government contractors. Meta seems close to the Trump admin too. Yet it's only the VC-funded labs raising the alarm.