The “losing control” narrative creates the loss of control. Nobody is losing control of an emerging intelligence. They are redirecting their own agency to the thing they are building. To take their story seriously, we would have to believe that the entire industry is captive to an absurd scenario of mind abduction:

“We cannot stop gathering data, cleaning it, pre-training models, calibrating the results of that pre-training to goals that we ourselves have researched and optimized toward, training and then post-training. We are doing all of that but nothing can intervene, we are addicts, in thrall to something greater than ourselves. We beg someone to save us.”

What can make sense of that? There is something in control here, but it isn't the technology. It is the organizing idea of “intelligence,” which is the wrong word for many reasons, but it operates as an ideology. They know this isn't true, they must act as if it is true to continue their work.