The bogeyman is not these models, it's future agentic autonomous ones, if and when they can hack major infrastructure or build nukes. The quoted text is very very clear on that.
All knowledge (publicly available and not) and all tools (AI or not) can be used by people in material ways to commit the aforementioned atrocities, but only the models producing novel knowledge would be at risk. I hope you can see how this law would stifle AI advancement. The boundary between what's acceptable and not would be drawn at generating novel, publicly unavailable information; not at information that could be used to harm - because all information can be used that way.
What if AI solves fusion and countries around the world start building fusion weapons of mass destruction? What if it solves personalized gene therapy and armed forces worldwide develop weapons that selectively kill their wartime foes? Should we not have split the atom just because that power was co-opted for evil means, or should we have not done the contraception research just because the third Reich used it for sterilization in their war crimes? This bill would work towards making AI never invent any of the novel things, simply out of fear that they will be corrupted by people as they have been in history. It would only slow research and whenever the (slower) research makes its discoveries, they would still get corrupted. In other words, there would be no change in human propensity to hurt others with knowledge, simply less knowledge.
Besides, the text is not "very very clear" on AI if and when it hacks major infrastructure or builds nukes. If it was "very very clear" on that, that is what it would say :) - "an AI model is prohibited to be the decision-making agent, solely instigating critical harm to humans". But what the text says is different.
I agree that AI harms to people and humanity need to be minimized but this bill is a miss rather than a hit and the veto is good news. We know AI alignment is needed. Other bills will come.
Well then, for my example, imagine a different future discovery that could be abused. Let’s say biological robots or a some new source of useful energy that is misused. Warring humans find ways to corrupt many scientific achievements for evil.
After we split the atom, and saw how dangerous it was, we established some damn strong protections in place to prevent kids from building nukes in their backyards for giggles. If we ever build a physicist AI that is better than Einstein at WMD-relevant research, I sure as hell hope we don't just let the kids ask it how to build nukes or antimatter bombs or whatever. And this is exactly what this regulation is about.
> But what the text says is different.
Since "prohibited" is a word that carries specific consequences, and lawyers are all about consequences, legal texts usually phrase it something like "if a model does critical harm to humans, the human responsible for building and releasing the model will be culpable for the crime", which is a very good TL;DR of the relevant parts of the bill. Isn't it?