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Notes -
Why do you presume loss of control?
Realistically, Anthropic gets its FOOM and has perfect control. Alignment isn't that hard. Of course, by that point they're likely still quite vulnerable to the monopoly on violence and their technology is nationalized. But a) they might think otherwise and b) in peacetime, they can scale their influence enormously, up to capturing both political parties.
It seems to me that this is only possible if
a) Anthropic's AI develops extremely superhuman capabilities in the vein of "overthrow the United States Government, make no mistakes".
b) Alignment is solved (I am not sure why you are so confident alignment is easy, given the abysmal state of mech interp relative to capabilities).
c) FOOM from "mundane" capabilities overlooked by the nation-state to "extremely superhuman" is so rapid that the nation-state cannot intervene before a) is achieved.
If a) is not true then AI works out like nukes; despite the strategic importance of nuclear weapons, Oppenheimer never got any say in how the bomb was used. The state will use its monopoly on violence to take control of the models, and Anthropic will not win that fight regardless of petty things like party donations or good PR; the only thing a functional nation state cannot tolerate under any circumstances is a threat to its sovereignty.
If b) is not true then straightforwardly if anyone builds it everyone dies.
If c) is not true then the scenario loops around to the first case; well before the models reach the "single-handedly overthrow the nation-state" stage, the models and frontier labs are inevitably going to be nationalized and made subordinate to the military.
I'm not quite sure if you're arguing that these three premises all being true is logically possible (which I concede is correct, although as an aside, I would argue that any world where all of these premises are made true would resemble the current world so little that saying "Anthropic" would be more powerful than the "Pentagon" would have little semantic meaning, but that is not particularly relevant to the main point here), or if your position is that it is actually plausible in reality that all three of these premises will be true simultaneously.
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