There's no contradiction. "True threats" is already a narrow exception defined by decades of Supreme Court precedent. It means statements where the speaker intends to communicate a serious expression of intent to commit unlawful violence against a person or group. That's it. It's not a blank check for the government to decide what counts as dangerous.
Brandenburg gives us the standard: speech can only be restricted if it's directed to inciting imminent lawless action and is likely to produce that action. True threats, child porn, fraud, these are all narrow, well-defined categories that survived strict scrutiny. They don't support creating broad new regulatory authority to filter outputs based on "dangerous capabilities."
You're asking how I define true threats. I don't. The Supreme Court does. That's the point. We have a constitutional framework for unprotected speech. It's extremely limited. The government can't just expand it because they think AI is scary.
"This technology is different" is what every regulator says about every new technology. Print was different. Radio was different. The internet was different. The First Amendment applies regardless. If AI enables someone to commit a crime, prosecute the crime. You don't get to regulate the information itself.
And yes, I want the government to stay out of mandating content restrictions. Not because I trust corporations, but because I trust the government even less with the power to define what information is too dangerous to share. You say governments are meant to serve citizens. Tell that to every government that's used "safety" as justification for censorship.
The issue isn't whether we need any AI regulation. It's whether we want to establish that the government can force companies to implement filtering systems based on the state's assessment of what capabilities are dangerous. That's the precedent SB 53 creates. Once that infrastructure exists, it will be used for whatever the government decides needs "safety mitigations" next.