I occasionally see articles and sentiments along the lines of, Anthropic is or is not, "scare mongering to boost the perceived cultural impact of their AI/ML tools; a sort of underhanded advertisement".

If your job is to defend Anthropic online, it's a good angle to fight from. It's a viral subject with no practical outcomes; the sort of thing that can cognitively DDoS your detractors for days.

Personally, I think Anthropic is scare mongering in order to kill their biggest competitor - free and open source ML. These companies, including Nvidia, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Apple, have invested untold billions into their own little ML ecosystems, as a loss leader, to get people and organizations emotionally dependent on this new technology, and eventually they are going to want ROI for that. The most likely obstacle to that is free and open models. Free and open training data and architecture makes the trillions or whatever previously pumped into the market obsolete. Out of all of the new technologies I've seen over the past couple decades, machine learning has the largest chance of success as a component of the free software ecosystem by a mile. How could any of these new trillionaires allow this to be?