The “empower vs replace” distinction seems less about intent and more about incentives. If you optimize for autonomous task completion, you get replacement; if you optimize for shared context and decision quality, you get augmentation.

aren't they majority funded by Google, MS, Amazon, NVIDIA, Sequoia, etc?

It's not like you can take $30B from these companies at a $200B valuation (the valuation is based on something) and then not be capitalistic.

Google owns 14%, Amazon 15-20%, founders 20-25%, VC ~30%. MS and NVIDIA ~5%.

They have a Kill Switch, but the reality is Anthropic is just one boardroom crisis away from becoming exactly like OpenAI

Google and Amazon don't have voting rights (because of competition laws), but they supply compute (survival rights)

Is this the new "we want to make the world a better place"?

I call complete BS and all lies, and close to the inevitability of replacing workers.

OpenAI was founded on the same 'principles' on open and responsible AI 'benefiting humanity' (which that was a scam) until the funding came in and it is now the exact opposite.

Just say we are replacing workers with robots. If we fall for this again, we have learned nothing at all.