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

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.

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.

99.999% of the point of cars is to use them on public roads

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