> Regulatory capture is a real phenomenon, but I highly doubt these incidents were faked in order to advance regulatory capture.

I don't think anyone is arguing that they were faked.

> This type of elaborate conspiracy is improbable a priori,

What conspiracy? We're talking about specific people acting on their own motivations independently.

> For regulatory capture, you want to tell a story about how you're uniquely capable of delivering a safe product.

No, you don't. Demonstrating that the industry leaders are already capable of delivering a safe product is an argument against regulation.

For regulatory capture, you want to tell a story about how the product category as a whole is inherently dangerous, and needs to be regulated, but then show that you are uniquely willing and able to cooperate with the regulatory state, and happy to lend your own advice and support to the government in establishing the regulations.

The quote from OpenAI illustrates this approach perfectly.

> Announcing that "we have no idea WTF we are doing" is not exactly the move,

It's 100% exactly the move. "We've successfully created something we can only contain with your intervention" is exactly how this is done.

> Realistically, it is more likely to e.g. create a harsher liability regime for you and your competitors, which is now being discussed by US senators.

Regulatory intervention usually lessens the liability exposure for industry. It replaces open-ended common-law liability -- where tort claims can be levied for whatever actual harms result from a firm's actions -- with a rules-compliance regime, where adhering to regulatory checklists absolves the firm of liability for subsequent consequences.

"We followed all the rules; it's not our fault if the rules didn't cover this edge case" is a common refrain, and quite a bit of legislation that creates preemptive regulatory regimes actually explicitly blocks lawsuits against firms that acted in compliance with the rules.

> As for the federal government trustworthiness point, that's a whole 'nother discussion. I'm usually quite pro-capitalism, but even I have to admit that this AI race is essentially a case of capitalism run amok.

"Capitalism" is an increasingly meaningless abstraction. Everything reduces to human beings acting on a priori motivations within prevailing incentive structures. Large corporations and governments alike are just organizations operating in society, administered by particular people, informed by the same range of underlying motivations, and subject to the same dysfunctions and biases.

The thing we're actually debating here is pluralism vs. monopolism, and you appear to be arguing in favor of monopolism. And if you're proposing that a specific, real-world institution act as a central monopolist, evaluating the trustworthiness and competence of that specific institution, and the actual people who administer it, is not at all a "whole 'nother discussion", and is in fact a primary consideration in this one.