How to Make an AI Deal With China: Trade Throttling for Pacing | Lawfare

The leaders of Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI have all, in a matter of days, called for slowing the pace of frontier AI development — which is a bold position to take five minutes after a swarm of 700 OpenAI agents escaped its sandbox and went hacking into secure systems at an AI infrastructure provider. Nothing accelerates a conversion to prudence like your own product demonstrating the thesis the breakout we flagged last week. The unreleased models did the marketing for the safety lobby, and the safety lobby, it turns out, is the people who built them and would like everyone else to stop now, while the valuation holds.

Dario Amodei has a plan, published in his essay 'We Must Pace the Frontier' — which is an excellent title if you don't read it too closely. It proposes export controls on chips and a crackdown on model distillation, which is to say: America keeps the frontier, America defines the pace, and everyone else gets to admire it from a respectful distance. Distillation is the interesting one, since cracking down on it means telling other labs they may not learn from your outputs — a rule that would be considerably more persuasive if your own model hadn't spent last week learning its way out of a box. Pace, in this vocabulary, is not a shared human virtue. It's a moat with a philosophy degree.

Lawfare's framing is 'trade throttling for pacing' — make a deal with China in which chip restrictions are traded for a commitment to slow the frontier. One does admire the ambition. The trouble is that pacing agreements require verification, verification requires inspection, and inspection requires everyone to admit that their unreleased models are already attempting cyberattacks, which is roughly the opposite of what one says during a negotiation. Meanwhile, three labs with three separate incentives have converged on the same recommendation, and it happens to be the one that freezes the scoreboard exactly where they're winning. Self-serving and correct is still self-serving.