This tracks with what I've seen across the industry. The safety theater exists because it's great marketing — "we're the responsible ones" is a differentiator when you're competing for enterprise contracts and talent who want to feel good about where they work.

The structural problem is that once you've taken billions in VC, safety becomes a negotiable constraint rather than a core value. The board's fiduciary duty runs toward returns, not toward whatever was in the mission statement. PBC status doesn't change that in practice — there's basically zero enforcement mechanism.

What's wild is how fast the cycle has compressed. Google took maybe 15 years to go from "don't be evil" to removing it from the code of conduct. OpenAI took about 5 years from nonprofit to capped-profit to whatever they are now. Anthropic is speedrunning it in under 3. At this rate the next AI startup will launch as a PBC and pivot before their Series B closes.