Meeting global food security goals while reducing agriculture’s environmental impact requires continued crop improvement and innovation. Advances in transgenesis, cisgenesis, and genome editing now enable increasingly precise genetic modification with risks comparable to those of conventional breeding, yet regulatory frameworks remain focused on the method used rather than the product. We highlight recent examples, including immune receptor transfer, cisgenesis-based disease resistance stacking, photosynthesis engineering, and AI-guided protein design, that illustrate innovations constrained by current regulatory approaches. A decisive shift toward science-based, proportionate, and product-focused regulation is needed so that improved crops are evaluated on the basis of their properties, not how they were made.