Pacing AI won’t solve the governance gap

In May 1972, Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev signed the agreements known as SALT I after years of negotiations over weapons capable of destroying both countries. Even with mutual annihilation as an incentive to cooperate, neither side would accept the other’s word alone. Onsite inspections inside the Soviet Union were politically unacceptable, so the agreement relied instead on what it called “national technical means of verification”: Each side watched the other through its own technology, including reconnaissance satellites. Agreement was desirable. Verification was indispensable. That’s the distinction I keep coming back to when reading Dario Amodei’s “We Must Pace the Frontier.” Amodei’s essay deserves to be taken seriously. His concern is that artificial intelligence capability is advancing faster than our ability to understand and control it, particularly as AI becomes capable of building the next generation of AI. His response is a three-step plan. First, give independent evaluators ongoing employee-level access to frontier labs to verify safety practices, something Anthropic has said it is committing to unilaterally. Second, get leading labs in democratic countries to align on shared safety standards, with government support where necessary. Third, pursue international agreements, including with China, on the most dangerous capabilities. I agree with…