Feeding biologically active compounds to large numbers of humans has a long track record of being dangerous in a reasonably large portion of cases.

The FDA was created once there was a realistic, significant risk.

Similarly, if you want to release pathogens or modified animals there's already a history of adverse events and a reasonable chance of non-zero risk. Even without GM we've had killer bees from normal crossbreeding. There's an established pattern of realistic, significant risk.

There are already lots of ~zero risk AI projects which change their own source code. Any law which bans Tierra or Avida are, likewise, poorly thought out laws.