Frontier labs are raising T-Rexes: why first-of-kind AI safety costs fall hardest on the leaders

tszzl · x · 2026-09-13

tszzl likens frontier labs' safety evaluation to Jurassic Park: they're hatching a T-Rex for the first time in 70 million years, absorbing enormous costs to test its capabilities under third-party assessors, probing for novel behaviors, and eventually publishing safety cases justifying which alignment and containment standards fit which capability level.

Responding to skepticism that the same costs would crush startups and open source, he argues later entrants only face a 'well-understood Stegosaurus' with standardized, nonzero-but-manageable safety costs—so 'pacing the frontier' compresses frontier labs' margins asymmetrically and would make a terrible regulatory-capture tactic.

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Frontier labs are raising T-Rexes: why first-of-kind AI safety costs fall hardest on the leaders

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