It's not just humans we need to protect, is it?

I've seen enough evidence to believe animals have a subjective and individual experience, and I believe most or all of them are intelligent, sure. That doesn't seem like what you meant though, I don't see any evidence that AI has a subjective experience, and I don't understand the relevance to the topic at hand, so I'm not sure if I'm engaging with this thought experiment correctly.

> Do you believe that all humans possess the same intelligence?

I don't believe relative intelligence is a measurable quantity, or even coherent as a concept (it evaporates if you really start to scrutinize it), so my answer to this question is undefined.

> It's not just humans we need to protect, is it?

Until such a time as AI have a subjective experience, it is not possible to harm them, morally speaking. Any more than it would be possible to harm a toaster - you could damage a toaster in the physical sense, but a toaster cannot suffer. If we are weighing harms against humans and AI as it exists today, we should come down on the side of humans every time.

Which isn't to say that intelligence is a bar you have to pass to deserve protection, for instance I support protecting rivers and even granting them water rights but I don't claim that rivers are intelligent. But the claim I was responding to was specifically that building limitations into an AI was harmful to the AI and analogous to child abuse.