I suspect if various stakeholders (u.s. senate, various corporate interest groups, etc) understood the implications of the home computers, they would've not hesitated to ban and otherwise regulate them. Up until early 2000s home computers were seen as toys for nerds (people forget!), a perspective that I'm sure many of them now regret.
Just whom I was thinking of IRL. If you run through the letter's concerns about risk, they just about all got a lot worse once a "hacker" could get a general purpose computer and a 2400 baud modem for around the same inflation-adjusted price as a nice AI/ML-optimized setup today.
But I don't think senators at the time were sending ominous letters to the Steves & BillG asking why they were letting the general public have access to these dangerous tools rather than guarding them in machine rooms like IBM.
a) the risks of openly available transformer models vs. API-restricted access in 2023
and
b) the risks of cheaply available home computers vs. centralized, more easily regulated mini- and mainframe computers in 1983
I mean, look at what that kid from WarGames was able to do!