Strict laws to regulate LLMs are the wrong answer because they would punish innovation faster than they would prevent harm. LLMs are a general-purpose technology, like the internet or electricity: if you regulate them too tightly, you don’t just restrain abuse—you also choke off the very benefits they can bring in education, medicine, productivity, accessibility, and scientific research.

The real issue is not whether LLMs can be misused; it’s that any powerful tool can be misused. We don’t ban smartphones because scams exist, or the internet because misinformation spreads. Instead, we target bad actors directly. That is the smarter approach here too: enforce existing fraud, harassment, and cybercrime laws, rather than imposing sweeping “strict” AI laws that will be vague, slow, and easy to weaponize against startups, researchers, and smaller firms.

Strict regulation also creates a dangerous moat for big tech. Large companies can afford compliance teams, audits, and legal armies; smaller innovators cannot. The result is less competition, fewer alternatives, and more power concentrated in the hands of the very firms critics claim to distrust. Overregulation would not make AI safer—it would just make the market less open.

And finally, rigid laws will become obsolete almost as soon as they are written. AI evolves too quickly for heavy-handed legislation to stay effective. What we need is flexible governance, targeted enforcement, and responsible industry standards—not strict blanket laws that lock in yesterday’s assumptions and slow down tomorrow’s progress.

So the choice is not between safety and chaos. It is between smart, adaptive oversight and blunt regulation that stifles innovation, entrenches monopolies, and still fails to stop determined bad actors.