This is a post from Robin Sloan’s lab blog & notebook. You can visit the blog’s homepage, or learn more about me.

Pacing consensus

September 6, 2026

It’s striking to see a con­sensus form in the AI industry, even at its heights, around the need for a research slow­down and delib­erate next steps. OpenAI’s Jakub Pachocki:

Cur­rently I believe that no lab has solved align­ment and mon­i­toring to a suf­fi­cient degree to con­tinue respon­sibly scaling at max­imum speed for much longer. I expect and hope for vol­un­tary slow­downs to become com­mon­place until shared safety bars are established. And I believe that inter­na­tional coor­di­na­tion on future AI devel­op­ment needs to become a top pri­ority for gov­ern­ments around the world.

Oof, that last part is going to be a heavy lift for the tech­nocrats of the world … but if the world ever needed them to lift, it’s now.

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