Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're actually making my point for me. 18 USC § 842 criminalizes distributing information with knowledge or intent that it will be used to commit a crime. That's criminal liability for completed conduct with a specific mens rea requirement. You have to actually know or intend the criminal use. SB 53 is different. It requires companies to implement filtering systems before anyone commits a crime or demonstrates crimi…
I hate that HN's guidelines ask me not to do this, but it's hard to answer point-by-point when there are so many. > You have to actually know or intend the criminal use. > If a company knowingly provides a service to facilitate imminent lawless action, that's already illegal. And if I tell an AI chatbot that I'm intending to commit a crime, and somehow it assists me in doing so, the company behind that service should…
The "companies want this" argument is irrelevant. Even if true, it doesn't make prior restraint constitutional. The government can't delegate its censorship powers to willing corporations. If companies are worried about liability, the answer is tort reform or clarifying safe harbor provisions, not building state-mandated filtering infrastructure.
On whether AI output is the company's speech: The First Amendment issue here isn't whose speech it is. It's that the government is compelling content-based restrictions. SB 53 doesn't just hold companies liable after harm occurs. It requires them to assess "dangerous capabilities" and implement "mitigations" before anyone gets hurt. That's prior restraint regardless of whether you call it the company's speech or not.
Your argument about LLMs being imperfect actually proves my point. You're saying mistakes will happen, so we need a framework. But the framework you're defending says the government gets to define what counts as dangerous and mandate filtering for it. That's exactly the infrastructure I'm warning about. Today it's "we can't perfectly control the models." Tomorrow it's "since we have to filter anyway, here are some other categories the state defines as harmful."
Given companies can't control their models perfectly due to the nature of AI technology, that's a product liability question, not a reason to establish government-mandated content filtering.