> So, assuming they are moderately sane is "conspiracy theory"?

Every time I've met someone who believes a conspiracy theory, they don't realise how not-sane the conspiracy they propose is.*

Founding a company on the basis you don't think the others are safe enough, raising capital on that basis, developing methods to improve AI safety, publishing literature about your methods, making open calls for legislation for safety standards, etc.?

While also managing to not leak documentation of this despite all the staff who did leave in order to openly speak about the stuff that they thought still wasn't safe enough?

Thinking that all the doom-talk from OpenAI and Anthropic** is just a PR technique even though they maintained this position continuously starting before they had any money or offices is about as sensible as thinking 9/11 was an insurance scam.

* by definition, because if they did they wouldn't believe it; actual conspiracies can of course be insane, but a conspiracy theory has to also justify why the "evidence" of conspiracy consists of people saying "I recon" rather than documents (specifically documents that mean what they think they mean, cf. "Mike's Nature trick").

** Again, just those two. I'm absolutely not fully generalising this, I'm absolutely not saying there's zero people who do as you say. Heck, the mere fact that this is a common talking point practically guarantees someone post-ChatGPT saw all the people claiming it was PR and said to themselves "great idea I'll do that".

Do not assume people are sane for any definition of sane. That way lies the madness.