Why?

Strong opinions are loud, but we might suppose that most people are floating. People perceive both benefits and harms on the horizon. Right or wrong, it's a defensible view that the way labs conduct their research might lead towards better or worse outcomes, for any given axis of "better or worse".

The incentives are for big labs to accelerate without considering the consequences, and we do not trust the moral values of the leaders, so we do not trust the labs to self-regulate.

While it is not logically invalid to argue that anyone who can legally acquire massive amounts of compute can do whatever the fuck they want, society desires a say in the development of potentially transformative or destructive technology. Analagously: campaigns against nuclear weapons. Relevant: things that ate not crimes at the time but are considered abhorrent in retrospect, e.g. chattel slavery, wars of conquest.

Ergo, a separate body that, one hopes, is trustworthy.

This content produced by meat.