I think that concentrating too much on what’s written in the RSP is a trap, and as indicated in the footnote, I agree with the interpretation that the RSP is not asking them to pause.
I think that would be better than a symbolic pause.
If Anthropic published its standard tomorrow with third-party verification, I’d take it. But I don’t think that this is where the bottleneck is. The bottleneck is political will, and your solution does not help on this front.
In short, a symbolic pause is one of the few moves that would have any effect on the scary narrative of “winning the AI race” while remaining an acceptable cost.
Strategically, “pacing the frontier” is a coordination statement that presumably required a herculean effort to produce and, so far, has not been substantiated beyond OpenAI’s very minimal pause. A published standard is cheap talk and costless to emit, and therefore weak evidence that a lab does something when stopping actually hurts. A pause costs something.
This would make international news, set a precedent, and build precious political will that we desperately need. “We believe we already meet the bar” has no effect on this front.
The price to pause only goes up from here. This is the largest incident so far and one of the cheapest weeks Anthropic will ever have to stop for. If Anthropic doesn’t pause at the maximum of public attention and the minimum of competitive cost, I don’t see the world where they pause later, especially when a lab thinks it’s a couple of months from a decisive strategic advantage.
I think that concentrating too much on what’s written in the RSP is a trap, and as indicated in the footnote, I agree with the interpretation that the RSP is not asking them to pause.
If Anthropic published its standard tomorrow with third-party verification, I’d take it. But I don’t think that this is where the bottleneck is. The bottleneck is political will, and your solution does not help on this front.
In short, a symbolic pause is one of the few moves that would have any effect on the scary narrative of “winning the AI race” while remaining an acceptable cost.
Strategically, “pacing the frontier” is a coordination statement that presumably required a herculean effort to produce and, so far, has not been substantiated beyond OpenAI’s very minimal pause. A published standard is cheap talk and costless to emit, and therefore weak evidence that a lab does something when stopping actually hurts. A pause costs something.
This would make international news, set a precedent, and build precious political will that we desperately need. “We believe we already meet the bar” has no effect on this front.
The price to pause only goes up from here. This is the largest incident so far and one of the cheapest weeks Anthropic will ever have to stop for. If Anthropic doesn’t pause at the maximum of public attention and the minimum of competitive cost, I don’t see the world where they pause later, especially when a lab thinks it’s a couple of months from a decisive strategic advantage.