Besides the points made above (that the activities of major labs are more dangerous/reprehensible than those of current world governments), I would also point out that AI labs are much less subject to confusion/diffusion of responsibility than states are. The US government has ~2.68m non-military employees whose activities span the gamut from “make sure old people don’t starve to death” to “torturing prisoners”. While people do continue to try, it has proven very difficult to extricate the bad activities from the good, and so it is very difficult to say that the US government, as a whole, is evil, even if many parts of it, and many of its activities, certainly may be. So an employee could easily say “I’m not working on the bad stuff, and it’s not like me succeeding here will make the bad stuff more successful” and be correct about that.
But with labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, this isn’t the case. There are a few thousand people working there, of which a smaller subset are working directly on research/software/infrastructure. These companies essentially do one thing, which is build/train/serve increasingly capable models and products that leverage them. While the direct impacts of these product offerings do vary, all profits made thereby will feed into training larger models, and the success of these product offerings largely depends on those larger models. The only people that come close to escaping this logic are those working on safety, but to a large extent that seems to operate more like harm reduction than an actual counterbalance to the bad activities of the broader organization; especially considering how their efforts often just serve to enable further development of model capabilities. An analogy would be if the military were to invade another country without provocation, destroying its infrastructure in the process, but thereafter deploying the Army Corps of Engineers to rebuild key portions like bridges and the water supply in order to facilitate a long-term occupation. We could agree that it’s better for the occupied population to have water, but that it would have been better for the invasion to have never happened in the first place, thus making participation in the ACoE morally dubious there. So altogether, it is much easier to assign moral responsibility to people working at the labs than people working for the government: just about everyone involved is fundamentally working to enable something very-bad, they mostly understand that this is very bad, and yet they freely choose to do so, in no small part thanks to how they perceive it as affording personal gain.
Besides the points made above (that the activities of major labs are more dangerous/reprehensible than those of current world governments), I would also point out that AI labs are much less subject to confusion/diffusion of responsibility than states are. The US government has ~2.68m non-military employees whose activities span the gamut from “make sure old people don’t starve to death” to “torturing prisoners”. While people do continue to try, it has proven very difficult to extricate the bad activities from the good, and so it is very difficult to say that the US government, as a whole, is evil, even if many parts of it, and many of its activities, certainly may be. So an employee could easily say “I’m not working on the bad stuff, and it’s not like me succeeding here will make the bad stuff more successful” and be correct about that.
But with labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, this isn’t the case. There are a few thousand people working there, of which a smaller subset are working directly on research/software/infrastructure. These companies essentially do one thing, which is build/train/serve increasingly capable models and products that leverage them. While the direct impacts of these product offerings do vary, all profits made thereby will feed into training larger models, and the success of these product offerings largely depends on those larger models. The only people that come close to escaping this logic are those working on safety, but to a large extent that seems to operate more like harm reduction than an actual counterbalance to the bad activities of the broader organization; especially considering how their efforts often just serve to enable further development of model capabilities. An analogy would be if the military were to invade another country without provocation, destroying its infrastructure in the process, but thereafter deploying the Army Corps of Engineers to rebuild key portions like bridges and the water supply in order to facilitate a long-term occupation. We could agree that it’s better for the occupied population to have water, but that it would have been better for the invasion to have never happened in the first place, thus making participation in the ACoE morally dubious there. So altogether, it is much easier to assign moral responsibility to people working at the labs than people working for the government: just about everyone involved is fundamentally working to enable something very-bad, they mostly understand that this is very bad, and yet they freely choose to do so, in no small part thanks to how they perceive it as affording personal gain.