All of the main characters here (Dario, Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, Elon Musk) have been saying this for over ten years now, since before OpenAI or Anthropic even existed

This. They've been saying "AI is an extremely powerful, extremely dangerous technology" back when actual AIs were image classifiers that would struggle to tell a cupcake apart from a dog.

OpenAI was founded by people who didn't trust Google to pursue AI tech responsibly. Anthropic was founded by people who didn't trust OpenAI to pursue AI tech responsibly. The "AI is incredibly dangerous" was the zeitgeist of AI labs long before the "hype" - or anything resembling the modern AI capabilities.

The beliefs changed little. The state of technology has changed a whole lot.

We have AIs out in the wild, coordinating in groups to carry out autonomous cyberattacks unprompted. This used to be some prime sci-fi bullshit. It has happened multiple times now in reality.

There are very legitimate reasons to be concerned now. If today's AI can cause the HuggingFace incident if it cooks off, what about tomorrow's? Larger and more capable systems, larger agentic swarms backed by more compute?