An International AI Slowdown Is Ready Whenever Politicians Are

Linkpost for a piece we recently published for AI Frontiers in the wake of recent calls for slowdown, covering how an international verification effort be trivially enforced by using human inspectors alone and the joint incentives for implementing one. On July 28, over a thousand employees of the world’s top AI companies advocated that the US government “support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.” Following months of cybersecurity scares and their own loss of control incidents, both OpenAI and Anthropic officially endorsed the same message, recognizing the danger of blindly accelerating AI development. Despite this new urgency, many people argue that coordinating an international slowdown is currently unworkable—including some of the same groups in favor of one. Namely, they claim that even if the US slowed down its own AI development, it wouldn’t be able to make sure that China was doing the same, leaving the US no choice but to race. These anti-slowdown arguments usually emphasize the technical challenges with designing AI monitoring measures to ensure a slowdown is being respected. In particular, slowdown skeptics argue that countries would refuse to install verification measures unless they were privacy-preserving enough to avoid leaking trade secrets and other sensitive information. They then point out that any near-term privacy-preserving verification technology would not be adversarially robust to nation-state attacks. If the Chinese government were actively trying to subvert a slowdown, it could use advanced techniques to fake workloads and spoof locations, including physical key extraction or even laser bit-flipping. Getting to the point where we can start implementing an international slowdown, the argument goes, might have to wait on years of R&D to solve both these problems. This perspective is missing the forest for the trees. Privacy-preserving verification tools that are immune to state adversaries would be ideal, but they are not a prerequisite for an AI slowdown. Robustly verifying limits on AI development is already feasible with low-tech methods. If there were enough political will to implement a joint slowdown, states could extensively monitor labs for unsanctioned behavior by simply placing human inspectors on the inside—an approach we call Whole-Lab Inspection (WLI). Under this proposal, inspectors from the US and China would receive broad physical access to frontier AI companies alongside read-only access to corporate communications, worklogs, code repositories, and compute telemetry. Using monitoring systems the companies already operate, they could observe operations and investigate potential violations—giving them the visibility of a CISO without requiring the powers of an operator. By literally and figuratively looking over the shoulders of lab employees, inspectors would likely be capable of robustly verifying fine-grained restrictions on AI development, such as bans on autonomous AI R&D and limitations on post-training. Overall, WLI demonstrates that an international slowdown is already technically possible; it’s just a question of whether the US and China will have the political will to jointly implement it. In the near future, political will to implement a joint slowdown could rapidly appear. If developed and diffused quickly, advanced AI systems are likely to intensely destabilize society by democratizing access to weapons of mass destruction and fueling waves of unemployment, regardless of whether they’re developed at home or abroad. On top of these threats, allowing an intelligence explosion would risk military escalation and loss of control, as states race to sabotage and deploy powerful AI systems for strategic advantage. Should the US slow down its own AI development domestically in anticipation of this instability and offer a reciprocal audit, China would have strong incentives to agree—both to ensure the U.S. does not recklessly deploy its own AI systems, and to avoid the chance of spiraling escalation over AI development. In what follows, we’ll argue that whole-lab inspections can be used to robustly enforce fine-grained limits on AI development. Then, we’ll speak to the incentives that might encourage the US and China to pursue a joint slowdown at some point using WLI. Finally, we’ll discuss the stability and risk reduction benefits of a well-timed slowdown. Enforcing a Slowdown Through Whole-Lab Inspections In order to agree to a slowdown, the US and China would need to know what research was being conducted inside each other’s frontier labs. Fortunately, visibility into AI development could be achieved by sending human auditors to comprehensively monitor labs. Auditors can have high visibility into AI companies. Monitoring for disallowed training runs or prohibited research activities may be largely trivial with human inspectors. In large part, this is because