I find it hard to believe that this wasn't a serious consideration until recently.

It was a serious consideration, and almost everyone around here laughed at it.

There valid reasons people laugh at it though. Kinda the same reason serious people laugh when you tell them the gun has digital failsafe.

It became a very serious consideration for Anthropic this year, with the advance of Chinese AI.

That’s a bit unfair, Dario Amodei has written in this topic a lot since around mid 2010s IIRC, Anthropic too published a good amount of stuff on similar topics. I don’t think the lack of consideration is really the issue here. It’s more a question of incentives

This is why culture is important to. You can't legislate morals and ethics.

We’ve seen this doesn’t work nearly as well as the homogeneous culture people would like us to believe. Ambrose Bierce nailed it (paraphrasing) the bible is an excellent book for your neighbour.

Laws change morals and ethics over time. They affect each other. Laws change what people think is moral (just look at how many people think it is moral to sell alcohol but immoral to sell cannabis. That of course is changing now as laws are changing).

You absolutely can legislate morals and ethics. That’s why you can’t murder people.

“Can’t” seems incorrect here. Plenty of people murder people.

You can’t murder people and expect life to go on as usual. But the act itself doesn’t seem to be eliminated by legislation.

Is the bar for this conversation “zero instances ever”?

Our laws are informed by our values. How can we possibly argue they aren’t an attempt at legislating ethics and morals?

I think the point is more, "you can't legislate holding those values".

Laws are informed by the interests (which may include morals) of the law-makers, and many people do base their morals in part on what laws exist, but most people believe that at least some laws are immoral, and some immoralities are legal.

Many law-makers want people to view illegalities as immoralities, but that's not how most humans operate.

The goal is the society by and large keeps those values as a whole. The values inform the laws and lead to a certain result that, in theory, reflects the value (politicians decide murder isn’t ok -> murder illegal -> fewer murders -> society now, in effect, broadly reflects a people that don’t think murder is ok). Whether people “buy in” is a different matter and is less material, though given enough time laws can cause people to shift culturally (morally, ethically). A society with lax rules on dumping trash will likely lead to more people not caring about the ethics of it over time as legal permissibility can lead to shifts in what we think is morally ok.

Much of Western Europe/Scandinavia has a stronger renewables culture than the US, for instance, but a lot of that was originally (and still is) driven by necessity. Fuel is more expensive, they don’t have as much space to dump things or build, etc. so they need to be more efficient which has also led to a “green culture.”

Laws and culture/morality/etc. aren’t as independent as you think IMO

Good example of their point. That’s not “why”.

No actual evidence in this article that this "PR Move" was anything other than a common garden folly. This article and "research" is long on assumption and speculation and has less evidence than an arthurian tale. Can modern historians provide anything of substance these days?

It’s almost becoming like prehistorical anthropology and archeology. Lots of assumptions and imagination and low on evidence.

Obviously with pre historical things we have to use our imagination since evidence is either scant or non-existent. But history now seems to accept more retconning and re-interpretations than before. Some re-interpretations do make sense when new evidence is found, but there are times when it’s done more for new narratives than actual truth seeking.