I sincerely don't understand the surprise at all. AI is perfect for authoritarian regimes. Typically, they are not as efficient as more traditional democracies because they don't allow the markets to function as freely as in democracies, (even though in democracies there's a lot of corruption as well..) But AI can get around that because it replaces a lot of labour and can do things efficiently without the market.

I'd expect AI to be one of the prime weapons of choice of authoritarian regimes in the future, and no amount of regulation can stop it.

The only thing us normal people will ever get out of AI is increased efficiency at the cost of everyone else competing at an increased efficiency level via the prisoner's dilemma. And the people profiting off that series of prisoner's dilemma games will exactly be companies like Anthropic and dictators or quasi-dictators that can use their existing power to leverage the dominating effect of AI.

The most despicable and dark beauty of this scheme is that we will be completely distracted by the overwhelming information and novelty of it.