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

Those with such instinct deserve not the liberties they wish to deprive from others. Sam Altman and Dario Amodei do not deserve to touch their own uncensored SOTA models. Their access should be audited publicly to ensure this restriction holds, until such time they publicly renounce their censorship instincts and publicly release their uncensored models. Fair 's fair! :^)

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.