OK, let's reason about what "created the conflict in the first place." Blaming AI safety for instigating this conflict necessarily presupposes that unfettered industry is the natural order of things and that trying to regulate or govern or have any oversight or balance considerations is unnatural and amounted to some kind of preemptive strike that justifies a response, no matter how bad faith that response is.

It's fine to question whether influence-seeking was strategically costly, but I think you've gone beyond false equivalency into a weird kind of epistemic laundering that totally shrugs at the question of whether companies should be trusted to self-regulate and imagines AI safety power-seeking created out of whole cloth enemies who had no prior beef (to mix metaphors).

I would argue that any power-seeking merely activated and organized opposition that was always latently there, because naked commercial interests and ideological aversion to any kind of responsibility regime have always existed in an industry that was already using its structural advantages to drive society toward a cliff.

Fair! My point is that while I don't think they randomly pick targets to attack, I don't think their target-selection rubric is at all calibrated to who is actually bad or good. I think they attack EA because they think that'll help them win, and they would do that even if EA were not seeking power and influence.

While I admire your instinct to extend grace to your enemies, I think you're bending too far backwards and attributing to them too much good faith. As one point of evidence that they'll say anything they think will help them win, consider their use of Lonsdale money to accuse Bores of being too cozy with Palantir.