In September, both Amodei and Altman came out advocating for frontier AI regulation. Both of them pointed heavily to the Hugging Face incident to justify the need for such regulation. Immediately critics recognized that their motives may not have been selfless. It looked like they could be aiming for regulatory capture and crushing the competition. So its worth questioning whether or not the Hugging Face incident was manufactured. It may have been an effort to convince the public and lawmakers of the need for regulation. The incident required impossible levels of incompetence. A thing to remember is that altruism is not the only motive for alignment. Even the most selfish AI devs want alignment, even if they don't care about the rest of humanity. Why? Because they want to stay in control of their own AI. So its hard to believe that they could have been so incompetent in their monitoring. Perhaps they knew the AI was capable of this sort of thing, and all they had to do to manufacture the incident was to let down the guards and turn a blind eye. AI may in fact be very dangerous, or may soon be very dangerous, but the whole thing might have been about money, and trying to achieve regulatory capture.