Geoffrey Irving rebuts Scott Alexander: a stronger version of unilateral AI pauses still holds
geoffreyirving · x · 2026-11-03
Geoffrey Irving responds on LessWrong to Scott Alexander's "Against SURA," arguing it attacks a strawman version of unilateral pauses—one Scott himself concedes deep in the post.
Irving sketches a "good version": a frontier lab (OpenAI or Anthropic) pauses capability research (all frontier runs, possibly plus low-scale capability work) on its own internally defined terms, which is easier than a coordinated pause and can gradually be made compatible with other actors' actions; personnel are redirected to alignment and product work rather than fired. He also pushes back on Scott's game theory claim: conditional pauses (resume if others don't follow) are not easier than plain pauses, since they require companies to commit to actions based on ambiguous game-theoretic evidence—which companies rarely act on.
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