AI breakout time: a mechanism for an enforceable AI pause

elseif has not written about this yet · Lesswrong describes it this way

The old Iran deal aimed to keep Iran at least one year away from having a nuclear bomb. Similar controls can be used to design an enforceable AI pause.[Note: this is probably a bit underspecified in a few places. I deliberately accelerated the pace at which I wrote this piece, so as to get it out to the public as far ahead as possible of the Trump-Xi summit in late September 2026, and get people thinking about the core idea if it's useful]To pause frontier AI development, you need to define the AI capabilities threshold that must not be passed. There are a number of ways to do so. You could freeze development at the currently-existing frontier, whether freezing each company at its current level of capabilities or allowing laggards to catch up to the leader’s level while going no further. You could define a dangerous-capability threshold and prohibit further progress beyond that point. You could set a maximum allowable amount of GPUs any one entity can hold, and/or the maximal allowed amount of compute that can go into any one training run. I argue that these approaches are suboptimal, and that the threshold should be defined so as to ensure it would take a skilled team with capacio