Linkpost for a piece we recently published for AI Frontiers in the wake of recent calls for slowdown, covering how an international verification effort be trivially enforced by using human inspectors alone and the joint incentives for implementing one.

On July 28, over a thousand employees of the world's top AI companies advocated that the US government “support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.” Following months of cybersecurity scares and their own loss of control incidents, both OpenAI and Anthropic officially endorsed the same message, recognizing the danger of blindly accelerating AI development.

Despite this new urgency, many people argue that coordinating an international slowdown is currently unworkable—including some of the same groups in favor of one. Even if the US slowed down its own AI development, it wouldn’t be able to make sure that China was doing the same, leaving the US no choice but to race.

These anti-slowdown arguments usually emphasize the technical challenges with designing AI monitoring measures to ensure a slowdown is being respected. In particular, slowdown skeptics argue that countries would refuse to install verification measures unless they were privacy-preserving [...]

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Outline:

(04:28) Enforcing a Slowdown Through Whole-Lab Inspections

(08:56) Joint Verification

(13:03) Benefits of Slowdown

(15:26) An AI Slowdown Does Not Require New Technology

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First published:
August 5th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jwipsPeb2xpyhwqsh/an-international-ai-slowdown-is-ready-whenever-politicians

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

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“An International AI Slowdown Is Ready Whenever Politicians Are” by Felix Choussat, adamk

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“An International AI Slowdown Is Ready Whenever Politicians Are” by Felix Choussat, adamk