Can Frontier AI Labs Lawfully Agree to Pause?

(Nicholas Felstead – Lawfare) The Anthropic Institute recently published an essay on “recursive self-improvement” (RSI)— the prospect of a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) system that is “capable of fully autonomously designing and developing its own successor.” Anthropic stresses that we are not yet at that point of RSI, but that AI is accelerating AI development at an alarming pace. Anthropic’s essay closes with a call for a slowdown in AI development to deal with the implications of RSI. It suggests that it “would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development” and that if systems existed that could verify peer company compliance, “we expect that we would slow down or temporarily pause, if other developers at or near the frontier also did so in a verifiable manner.” This is a market-leading company publicly stating that it is prepared to halt development of its most important and financially lucrative products, provided that its competitors verifiably do the same. A coordinated pause may be the most valuable safety intervention available to the industry, and it is also the form of collaboration most likely to raise antitrust concerns. – Can Frontier AI Labs Lawfully Agree to Pause? | Lawfare