The architecture of a pause

I believe (?) this is the crispest state­ment of this kind that Anthropic has yet made … 

We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or tem­porarily pause fron­tier AI devel­op­ment to enable soci­etal struc­tures and align­ment research to keep up with the advance of the technology. The Anthropic Insti­tute will con­duct research — in col­lab­o­ra­tion with many others — and take actions to help build the sys­tems that a cred­ible slow­down or pause would require. These sys­tems would enable fron­tier AI devel­opers to verify that others glob­ally have actu­ally stopped or slowed, and that a bad actor could not use the aus­pices of a coor­di­nated slow­down to jump ahead in secret. If such sys­tems existed, we expect that we would slow down or tem­porarily pause, if other devel­opers at or near the fron­tier also did so in a ver­i­fi­able manner.

 … and it’s extremely wel­come news. It seems to me self-evident that a slow­down and/or pause would be a wise thing for humanity — indeed, it would be evi­dence that our civ­i­liza­tion actu­ally HAS a bit of wisdom! — yet I under­stand the complexity. A state­ment of this kind is a small but, IMO, very mean­ingful step in the right direction.