This is a very troubling development. OpenAI and Anthropic are free to slow down their own AI development efforts all they want. They can cap their compute spend and cut back their own capabilities in various ways. That would be a huge loss for America, but that is their own business. It is absolutely outrageous, however, for America’s two leading labs to ask our government to advocate global “pacing” constraints be imposed on the entire sector. Calling for a global gatekeeper for AI that will cripple our entire nation’s computational capabilities has obvious anti-competitive effects (especially for open source) -- which makes ongoing fears about regulatory capture all the more credible. But that is secondary to the more important point: In the name of addressing one risk, we open ourselves to an even bigger one. A call for mandatory national surrender to a global pacing agreement / body will not constrain China or other actors from advancing, and it will leave America more vulnerable as a result. We stay at the cutting edge because we must. We can find far more reasonable ways to address frontier model safety without restoring to extreme -- and frankly unworkable -- solutions.