CEOs of major AI labs, and employees of major AI labs, including OpenAI and Anthropic, often say they plan to build superintelligence soon, as in within a few years create AIs that are superior to humans at essentially all cognitive tasks.

They often warn that such AIs might kill everyone. Or that AIs might cause mass unemployment, cause cyberattacks across the internet, enable mass surveillance or risk causing any number of other highly bad things.

These warnings are consistently and directly against the interests of the labs. Yet the warnings have recently gotten a lot louder and more frequent. OpenAI has been practically screaming, for those with ears to listen, on many occasions.

A series of events, over two months and especially the last week or so, including internal observations of the pace of progress at OpenAI and also Anthropic, have freaked out everyone involved quite a lot more than they were already freaked out.