To be fair, lots of people called this pretty early on, it's just that very few people were paying attention, and instead chose to accommodate the spin, immediately went into "following the money", a.k.a. blaming Microsoft, et al. The most surprising aspect of it all is complete lack of criticism towards US authorities! We were shown this exciting play as old as world— a genius scientist being exploited politically by means of pride and envy.
The brave board of "totally independent" NGO patriots (one of whom is referred to, by insiders, as wielding influence comparable to USAF colonel.[1]) who brand themselves as this new regime that will return OpenAI to its former moral and ethical glory, so the first thing they were forced to do was get rid of the main greedy capitalist Altman; he's obviously the great seducer who brought their blameless organisation down by turning it into this horrible money-making machine. So they were going to put in his place their nominal ideological leader Sutzkever, commonly referred to in various public communications as "true believer". What does he believe in? In the coming of literal superpower, and quite particular one at that; in this case we are talking about AGI. The belief structure here is remarkable interlinked and this can be seen by evaluating side-channel discourse from adjacent "believers", see [2].
Roughly speaking, and based from my experience in this kind of analysis, and please give me some leeway as English is not my native language, what I see is all the infallible markers of operative work; we see security officers, we see their methods of work. If you are a hammer, everything around you looks like a nail. If you are an officer in the Clandestine Service or any of the dozens of sections across counterintelligence function overseeing the IT sector, then you clearly understand that all these AI startups are, in fact, developing weapons & pose a direct threat to the strategic interests slash national security of the United States. The American security apparatus has a word they use to describe such elements: "terrorist." I was taught to look up when assessing actions of the Americans, i.e. most often than not we're expecting noth' but highest level of professionalism, leadership, analytical prowess. I personally struggle to see how running parasitic virtual organisations in the middle of downtown SFO and re-shuffling agent networks in key AI enterprises as blatantly as we had seen over the weekend— is supposed to inspire confidence. Thus, in a tech startup in the middle of San Francisco, where it would seem there shouldn’t be any terrorists, or otherwise ideologues in orange rags, they sit on boards and stage palace coups. Horrible!
I believe that US state-side counterintelligence shouldn't meddle in natural business processes in the US, and instead make their policy on this stuff crystal clear using normal, legal means. Let's put a stop to this soldier mindset where you fear any thing that you can't understand. AI is not a weapon, and AI startups are not some terrorist cells for them to run.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38330819
[2]: https://nitter.net/jeremyphoward/status/1725712220955586899