Especially when 'safety' has such a blurred definition, we could be talking about anything from the threat of global apocalypse to to the 'threat' of an AI merely being able to answer questions about 'wrong' political opinions.
Skynet isn't going to happen. The biggest threat from AI is taking jobs away and creating poverty while redirecting more wealth to the super-rich.
In the short term, we're likely to be facing a lot more convincing spam/bots and deepfakery in the run up to the election - but is that the fault of the AI, or the fault of the humans directly operating their new toys/tools?
The only thing we can do is limit how megacorps can openly abuse the technology.
If you ban open large models in US, you'll cripple US and make few megacorps very rich, very quickly. You'll drain talent to other (also competing) states. Truly bad actors won't be affected, if anything they'll get advantage.
People draw weird analogies equating llama2 to nuclear device etc. nonsense but the closer analogy would be to ban on semiconductors of certain efficiency for US itself.
Similar idiotic argument as for banning cryptography.
once you understand that what they are trying to protect is the safety of their profits every of their argument start to make sense.