You need to stop X companies to get a Y-month pause

Per LessWrong, a new analysis examined how many AI companies would need to pause development to slow artificial intelligence progress. Using the Epoch Capability Index to rank companies by their distance from frontier capabilities, the author found that halting just two—OpenAI and Anthropic—would delay the next competitor by five months. Achieving a two-year pause requires stopping thirteen companies; three years would need fourteen. The analysis assumes the strongest companies pause first and development speeds don't change, but it quantifies a central question in AI governance: how difficult achieving real coordination among rival labs actually is.

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