I see it in much the same light - and the spending going into it leads me to infer that those doing the spending see the same thing.

Whoever gets to RSI first and has the compute to act on it, wins the future - assuming they don’t lose control of it.

Similarly to the nuclear arms race, Teller raised the reasonable concern that a detonation could propagate through the entirety of earth’s atmosphere. Thankfully that turned out to not be true, but the parallel is that the need/desire to win this race is similarly strong, and the brinkmanship and game theory in play is effectively identical.