I don't fully understand the instinct to regulate local models for this? It seems like the wrong place to address the problem.

You can download Ebola sequences right now if you want to. That's not the same as having an isolate. The difference is a lot of messy reality. This kind of work is not generally "one shot" (Claude make me a supervirus, make no mistakes), it requires lab space, iteration, and specific resources. It has a footprint.

Wouldn't it make more sense to monitor / regulate facilities where you can sequence or request assembly of DNA, RNA, restrict and monitor the supply of key reagents and so on?

Yeah I was thinking more on the scale of nation-state level actors. Most leaders would not consider a bio weapon due to potential blowback on their own population, as they generally don’t want to be the leader of a nation of corpses and ashes.

But if they don’t care, or if they already are the leader of a nation of corpses and ashes, maybe there’s not so much holding them back.

In my layman’s perspective, bio weapons seem to be more dangerous and volatile than nuclear weapons. And increasingly easier to engineer as biotech advances. I think about the headlines of “microscopic robots that target tumors from within your body” and see the horrifying opposite side of the double-edged sword.

It depends how easy it is (now, or in the near future) to turn information into weapons, and how realistic control of materials is. There's a reason we control access to plutonium, but information about metastable hafnium.