If you read the scenario, you'll see that the regulations are mostly about what people can do with giant compute clusters, and not about the ideas themselves. The ideas themselves are required to be totally transparent to the public.

As for historic precedents: Human cloning, human genome editing, and mirror life seem like one precedent; nuclear weapons and nuclear energy another; come to think of it I think drone delivery was strangled by regulations too...? Plan A isn't a proposal to never build superintelligence, it's a proposal to build it more cautiously and transparently.