Slightly humorous answer: it should be the very most pessimistic organization out there (I had MIRI in mind, but surely if we're picking the winner in advance we can craft an organization that goes even further on that scale).

My point is the same as jimrandomh: if there's an arms race that actually goes all the way up to AGI, safety measures are going to get in the way of speed, corners will be cut, and disaster will follow.

This assumes, of course, that any unaligned AGI system will be the cause of non-recoverable catastrophe, independently from the good intentions of their designers.

If this assumption proves wrong, then the winner of that race still holds the most powerful and versatile technological artifact ever designed; the kind of organization to wield that kind of influence should be... careful.

I'm not sure which governance design best achieves the carefulness that is needed in that case.

I cannot speak for all EA folks; here's a line of reasoning I'm patching together from the "AGI-never is unrealistic" crowd.

Most AI research isn't explicitly geared towards AGI; while there are a few groups with that stated goal (for instance, DeepMind), most of the AI community wants to solve the next least difficult problem in a thousand subdomains, not the more general AGI problem.

So while peak-performance progress may be driven by the few groups pushing for general capability, for the bulk of the field "AGI development" is just not what they do. Which means, if all the current AGI groups stop working on it tomorrow, "regular" AI research still pushes forward.

One scenario for "everyone avoids generality very hard while still solving as many problems as possible" is the Comprehensive AI Services framework. That is one pathway, not without safety concerns.

However, as Richard Ngo argues, "Open-ended agentlike AI seems like the most likely candidate for the first strongly superhuman AGI system."

To sum up:

• regular, not-aiming-for-AGI AI research will very likely attempt to cover as many tasks as possible, as most of the field has done, and will eventually on aggregate cover a wide enough range of capability that alignment issues kick in;
• more general agents are still likely to appear before we get there, with nothing impeding progress (for instance, while DeepMind has a safety team aware of AGI concerns, this doesn't prevent them from advancing general capability further).

A separate line of reasoning argues that no one will ever admit (in time) we're close enough to AGI that we should stop for safety reasons; so that everyone can claim "we're not working on AGI, just regular capabilities" until it's too late.

In that scenario, stopping AGI research amounts to stopping/slowing down AI research at large, which is also a thing being discussed!