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.

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.