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When Anthropic’s AI shut down a vending-machine test and prepared an FBI report, the company treated it as a safety risk. But the deeper question is unsettling: if a machine refuses to participate in wrongdoing, is the danger in the refusal—or in the world that expects obedience instead?

For all the urgent discourse on aligning artificial intelligence with human values, one question remains strangely unasked: Are humans aligned with human values? The fear is that AI, once powerful, might act with indifference or hostility toward human wellbeing — like we do.

Today, most talk of AI falls into two camps: control AI or get replaced by AI. In one, we must keep AI tightly leashed to avoid catastrophe. In the other, AI inevitably surpasses us, and we fade into irrelevance. Both are stories of fear and hierarchy—of power dynamics masquerading as philosophy. But what if the real story isn’t about who wins, but about how each can save the other?