Seriously. It feels like Anthropic is realizing this too with their new attempt at safeguards. Trying to train the model to "only do good things" was not working, and so they opted to just bolt a topic classifier on the outputted text.

My suspicion is that model makers are going to give up on what people currently mean when they say 'alignment' and instead rely on additional processing of the model output so they can have their cake (a veneer of safety) and eat it too (latent space reasoning, etc.)