A three-year AI pause could buy 1000 years' worth of AI safety work.

See: https://1000yearsofaisafety.com

How much AI safety work a pause produces, in years of the whole 2025 AI safety field's work. The government bans new large training runs and gets the top three US labs to redirect their GPUs and researchers to safety research.

We developed a model of an AI pause that estimates how much AI safety research it produces. We don't know what the pause will look like, so we modeled five durations, four AI capability levels and four levels of trust in AI. We’ll use it to improve Plan A, but it already shows a few things:

A three-year pause produces 1000 times more AI safety research than was done in 2025. A nine-year pause produces 100,000 times more.
Checking it all takes an army. If you let AI work autonomously for 9 years, you will need 2.8 million verifiers to check it all. With safer verification protocols, it goes down to 150k verifiers.
Without an army, you still get a lot. In the worst case, you still get 44% of the potential AI safety research. That's because not all research is equally [...]