There are zero laws against the design, manufacture, sale, or possession of cars with spinning blades and/or flamethrowers.

Such laws attach to the human operators of such cars, if they recklessly endanger others by driving them on shared, public roads.

But they're perfectly legal to own (and operate off-road). And, there's no technical barrier stopping people from illegally driving them on public roads: just fear of laws.

(There's entire subcultures of people who modify cars to do insanely dangerous things, on private race tracks. Perfectly legal).

If we were to apply Amodei's safety standard to cars—do they have the theoretical risk of killing over 50 people—well, cars empirically kill tens of thousands of people in the US annually, so we'd have to categorically ban them. That standard is bad-faith and absurd.

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jayd16 an hour ago | parent [-]

So we just make the regulation such that it kicks in on machines connected to the public web?

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peri-cl an hour ago | parent [-]

No. Half the point of LLM's is having them research topics on the internet as your agent. It's totally harmless in the usual (tool-based search) workflow.

(Would we also need a real ID to operate curl(1)?)

Regulations should attach only at the point humans willfully or recklessly cause their agents to commit crimes.

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jayd16 an hour ago | parent [-]

But keeping with the analogy, a car manufacturer would be liable for a faulty design that caused wrecks, no? It doesn't need to be willful by the user.

	▲	peri-cl 44 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, sure. I'd be open to the idea of regulating commercial vendors of inference tools to consumers (for suitability). You can separate the concepts of commerce and speech (and US law does that extensively). What Amodei's trying to do is outlaw free, open-weight models. That's two distinctions: (1) non-commercial, and (2) abstract, intangible mathematics. Pure speech. Same as Phil Zimmerman and PGP. Even the EU's draconian open-source regulations (which HN criticizes endlessly) exempt free software which is purely non-commercial.