This isn't new in general, no. While I meant more adversarial situations than contracts and laws, to which people are used and for the most part just go along with, I do recognize that those are common too - competition can be fierce, and of course none of us are strangers to the "alignment issues" between individuals and organizations. Hell, a significant fraction of HN threads boil down to discussing this.

So it's not new; I just didn't connect it with AI. I thought in terms of "right to repair", "war on general-purpose computing", or a myriad of different things people hate about what "the market decided" or what they do to "stick it to the Man". I didn't connect it with AI alignment, because I guess I always imagined if we build AGI, it'll be through fast take-off; I did not consider we might have a prolonged period of AI as a generally available commercial product along the way.

(In my defense, this is highly unusual; as Karpathy pointed out in his recent talk, generative AI took a path that's contrary to normal for technological breakthroughs - the full power became available to the general public and small businesses before it was embraced by corporations, governments, and the military. The Internet, for example, went the other way around.)