A former Anthropic researcher backing AI safety rules is pushing back on claims that the big labs want regulation to crush competitors — a sign the fight over AI rules is now a fight inside the industry itself.

• The core argument: the optimistic future Marc Andreessen and David Sacks describe is what you get *if* AI slows down, not if it races ahead.
• The fear is losing control — AI systems improving themselves daily and an AI economy running alongside people, doing things nobody understands.
• The regulation push is not a climate-style or anti-business crusade; the position is pro-capitalism and near-libertarian, favoring deregulating drugs, biology research and energy, with AI as the single exception.
• Elon Musk is cited as proof the worry is mainstream: he built xAI only because rivals were already racing, after years of warning about the technology.
• Roughly a third of the engineers and researchers at OpenAI and Anthropic are in their 20s, and their views are mixed rather than uniformly left-leaning.

Outlook: Expect the AI regulation debate to keep splitting Silicon Valley rather than falling along normal party lines, with safety advocates and accelerationists both claiming the pro-growth label.