I'm not saying absence of evidence of wrongdoing is evidence of absence of wrongdoing.

But note, you have very concrete things to claim about Bitfinex. Criminal enterprise, scam, organized crime funding, facilitating arms dealing and embargo avoidance, and so on.

Then you throw in 2008. It's definitely popular but example of what? Bad thing that didn't fail? (Things did fail, hence the crisis? Or you mean the too big to fail attitude?)

Policy proposals (eg. "coordinated AI safety R&D should be exempt from antitrust regulations" or "TARP made money on paper, but the financial sector should pay for the total cost of the crisis") cannot be divorced from the provenance of the source (sex cult, goldbugs, anticapitalists), but the same is true of bluesky screeds.

2008 was a shortened mention of the event when multiple companies by all rights went "bad", i.e. should have went bankrupt on their own merit and performance. But an external entity bailed them out and so they continue to exist and work later on. But does this mean that those companies (like Fannie Mae et. al.) weren't "bad" in 2008? No, it doesn't.

Same logic with pure AI corpos and adjacent dependents. If the doomsayers would ever be right about them being financially unsustainable, then most likely these companies would never get even close to the bankruptcy, simply because they would be bailed by external entities. So we would never be sure if OpenAI and Anthropic were "bad" or not, financially. Because either critics are wrong, or any corporate deficits would be covered by budget money (maybe foreign budget, it happens too).