I think protection for whistleblowers both in AI and in general is a good thing, but ... do we really need a special carveout for AI whistleblowers? Do we not already have protections for them, or is it insufficient? And if we don't have them already, why not pass general protections instead of something so hyper-specific?
(not directing these questions at you specifically, though if you know I'd certainly love to hear your thoughts)
You have to understand what the purpose of this bill is.
It's not supposed to do anything in particular. It's supposed to demonstrate to the public that lawmakers are Taking Action about this whole AI thing.
An earlier version of the bill had a bunch of aggressive requirements, most of which would have been bad. The version that passed is more along the lines of filing paperwork and new rules that are largely redundant with existing rules, which is wasteful and effectively useless. But that was the thing that satisfied the major stakeholders, because the huge corporations don't care about spending ~0% of their revenue on some extra paper pushers and the legislators now get to claim that they did something about the thing everybody is talking about.
I think the idea is that explicit protections might encourage whistle-blowing. Especially since the domain is nascent enough that it's not clear what you'd blow the whistle on that might be unique to the companies that make foundation models. In many cases, there will be whistleblowers who both disclose what is being fed into models, but also details in aggregate about what users of models can do.
(not directing these questions at you specifically, though if you know I'd certainly love to hear your thoughts)