but it certainly doesn't qualify as one from a legal point of view
I'm not nearly so confident. The Powers That Be don't need to be all that reasonable about these things. Because of the bit about the Power.
I expect a security oriented government body would be able to come up with as many ways for creating a superintelligence to be illegal as MoR!Harry could find ways to weaponise Hufflepuffs. Calling it a WoMD would just be one of them.
It's conceivable that, at some point, building design frameworks for friendly artificial intelligences (or, more plausibly, artificial intelligences in general) might be made illegal, but it certainly isn't illegal now.
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