Science News has a more balanced take, with additional quotes from peers.
> Some have also grumbled about Adamala’s efforts to draw attention to the work, which she says was rejected by Cell after one reviewer said SpudCells were not real biology. She then sent the 190-page manuscript to journalists, under embargo, even before she had uploaded it to the preprint server bioRxiv, where her colleagues could read and assess it. She says her group will submit it to a new journal soon. “It’s an unusual way of doing things,” says Kerstin Göpfrich, a synthetic biologist at Heidelberg University.
> What should worry Europe, instead, are the geopolitical implications of US/Chinese leadership in advanced technology. We used to have a global economic system overseen by a mostly benign and in any case law-abiding hegemon. That system was, however, gradually eroding with the rise of China, and has now taken a drastic hit with America’s abandonment of the rules it largely created.
Supposedly many Anthropic AI researchers are foreign nationals. So this move by the US gov may serve to slow down frontier AI research, including human-guided RSI. If you believe that such a slowdown increases safety, it may turn out as a blessing in disguise.
I find the concept of low floor/high ceiling quite helpful, as for instance recently discussed in "When Will AI Transform the Economy?" [1] - actually more helpful than "jagged" intelligence used in TFA.