“How to pace the US frontier” by elifland, bhalstead, romeo, Thomas Larsen, MKodama

Introduction Last week, the Pacing the Frontier open letter, signed by over 1,000 frontier AI employees, requested “the U.S. government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.” We take “pacing the frontier” to mean moderating the time at which AIs above a specified capability level are developed within a given jurisdiction (either just in the US, or internationally as the letter called for). There are many reasons you might want to do this, but in this post we focus on minimizing existential risk. We recently published AI 2040: Plan A, laying out an ambitious proposal for an international effort that would pace the frontier (as part of a broader policy package). But in AI 2040, international coordination happens before serious domestic regulation. In reality, it may be good to start with domestic regulation and then aim to expand that into international coordination. In part, domestic pacing is valuable because it would also slow down China: US companies would have less capable models for Chinese companies to distill from and they would have worse algorithms and models for Chinese companies to steal. So we’ve spent the [...] ---Outline:(00:11) Introduction(02:14) High-level proposal(06:54) Proposal details(06:57) Compute allocation requirements(07:02) Overview(08:51) Minimum external-inference-compute allocation(10:13) Minimum transparent-safety-compute allocation(13:16) Effect of compute allocation minimums(14:21) Measuring AI capabilities(15:32) Limit capabilities of models used for AI R&D(18:13) Safety-case-based risk assessments(19:00) How to do the risk assessments?(20:01) What should the risk target be?(22:26) Comparing compute allocation requirements against safety-case-based pacing(26:37) But wouldn't domestic pacing let China win?(28:37) How our proposals would change for international, rather than domestic, pacing(32:46) When to start pacing the frontier(35:18) How to prepare to pace the frontier(39:12) Broader classification of pacing proposals(43:18) Acknowledgments The original text contained 9 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: August 7th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dBrGqjYxmidRaLLCr/how-to-pace-the-us-frontier --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.