What Are We Pacing Against? Jess Whittlestone on Making 'Pacing the Frontier' Real
connoraxiotes · x · 2026-09-23
A substantive essay by Dr Jess Whittlestone on the industry's shift toward "pacing the frontier" — Dario Amodei's plan, broadly endorsed by Altman, Musk and Hassabis.
Key points:
- Risk: pacing risks becoming a slogan everyone agrees to without substantive commitment; we need clarity on what is paced, against what benchmarks, and when it is safe to proceed.
- Core proposal: prevent AI capabilities from advancing faster than our ability to manage their risks — a defence-in-depth approach tying capability advances to evidence that alignment, control, shutdown, detection and societal resilience are mature.
- Builds on responsible scaling policies but focuses on development decisions and a wider set of defences.
- Near-term direction is clear: substantially strengthen defences while building the technical and institutional machinery.
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