Comment by Andrew Locke

The pace of frontier AI development is currently outstripping our ability to ensure its safety, governance, and alignment with human values. We are racing to build systems with unprecedented capability without first building the guardrails, evaluation frameworks, or scientific understanding needed to control them. Proposing a slowdown is not about stalling progress or rejecting technology—it is about demanding precision and responsibility. Right now, competitive pressure forces labs (and nation state actors) to deploy systems before their full failure modes, catastrophic risks, or societal disruptions are understood. By shifting our focus from pure capability scaling to safety, alignment, and robust evaluation, we give humanity the time required to build AI that is reliable, controllable, and genuinely beneficial for everyone.