Are these safety teams subject to the oversight of more estabilished international agreements and safeguards?
“Unlike the chemical or nuclear weapons regimes, the [Biological Weapons Convention] lacks both a system to verify states' compliance with the treaty and a separate international organization to support the convention's effective implementation” [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_Weapons_Convention
https://disarmament.unoda.org/en/our-work/weapons-mass-destr...
You can read more about the efforts for disarmament there.
Biological weapons compliance is entirely voluntary. We don’t have international monitors watching America and Russia’s smallpox stockpiles. That’s left to each nation.
There are efforts at estabilishing it though. And it's hard and expensive for wet labs, but it could be much simpler for things like simulating biological pathways.
One could also see your response as "other nations are developing threats, we should race", which I personally think is misguided.
Instead of these petty armchair discussions, we should instead focus on being more serious about it.
All our orgs have openings and if you also could consider working for organizations such as the UK AISI team and other independent organizations that are assessing these models. It's a critical field and there is a need for motivated folks.