Pausing AI at human-genius level to solve alignment is safer than either racing to superintelligence or halting entirely

For (15)

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  Brendan Halstead

  AI Futures Project researcher writing on AI takeoff modeling and Plan A capability trajectories.

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  votes For and says:

  Unlike all other actors we model, the consortium is not racing to build better AIs as fast as they possibly can. The specific strategies are discussed in more detail in the Capabilities Scaling Strategy supplement, but at a high level, the strategy i...

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  Eli Lifland

  AI Futures Project researcher writing on AI capability scaling, controlled takeoff, and comparative AI governance plans.

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  votes For and says:

  In the Plan A scenario, why does the Consortium choose to steadily increase capabilities until reaching top-expert-dominating AI (TED-AI) in 2035, then slow down nearly to a pause until handing off to these AIs in 2040? [...] Scale until you’re close...

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  AI Futures Project

  Nonprofit AI forecasting research group behind AI 2027 and Plan A; led by Daniel Kokotajlo.

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  votes For and says:

  Between 2030 and 2035, we scale within the human range, to AIs that are roughly as capable as top human experts... In 2035, we pause at top-human-expert level AI in order to maintain human control. In 2040, we unpause and scale to superintelligence.

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  Scott Alexander

  Author and psychiatrist

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  votes For and says:

  Then, in the mid-2030s, they pause at AIs around the level of top human geniuses. These AIs are close enough to current AIs that the same alignment techniques that mostly-sort-of-work for ours might mostly-sort-of-work for them too... The plan is to ...

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  Anthropic Institute

  Anthropic policy and research institute studying AI capabilities, governance, and societal impacts.

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  votes For and says:

  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...

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  Wei Dai

  Computer engineer, cryptographer, and AI alignment writer known for Crypto++ and b-money

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  votes For and says:

  If AIs became strategically competent enough, they may realize that RSI is too dangerous because they're not good enough at alignment or philosophy or strategy, and potentially convince, help, or work with humans to implement an AI pause. This presen...

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  Michael Dickens

  Writer at Philosophical Multicore on explicit Bayesian reasoning and decision-making

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  votes For and says:

  An alternative approach: Don't pause yet. First develop human-level AI that can help us solve the world's major problems. Don't develop superintelligence until we're on stable ground philosophically, but still take advantage of the productivity boost...

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  Ajeya Cotra

  AI safety researcher; senior research analyst at Open Philanthropy

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  votes For and says:

  I think that what we want to do as a society, if we gain confidence that we’re at the starting point of this intelligence explosion, is to redirect as much of that AI labour as we can from further AI R&D to things that could help protect us from futu...

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  Statement on Superintelligence

  2025 public statement hosted by the Future of Life Institute calling for restrictions on superintelligence development.

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  votes For and says:

  We call for a prohibition on the development of superintelligence, not lifted before there is (1) broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably, and (2) strong public buy-in.

  AI Verified source (Sep 22, 2025)

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  Joe Carlsmith

  Senior research analyst at Open Philanthropy; writes on AI safety, alignment, and existential risk from power-seeking AI

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  votes For and says:

  If our ability to make increasingly capable AI systems safe can’t benefit from such labor in a comparable way, then at least for relatively hard problem profiles, and absent large amounts of capability restraint, I think we’re likely headed for disas...

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  Ryan Greenblatt

  Chief Scientist at Redwood Research; AI safety researcher; lead author of "Alignment faking in large language models"

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  votes For and says:

  I do think that pausing further capabilities once we have human-ish-level AIs for even just a few years while we focus on safety would massively improve the situation. This currently seems unlikely to happen.

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  Sam Bowman

  AI alignment researcher at Anthropic; on leave from NYU

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  votes For and says:

  The RSP aims to make it consistently the case that our model training and deployment meets a high, clearly-specified bar for safety and that there is publicly accessible evidence that we have met this bar. Roughly speaking, we run tests (‘frontier ri...

  more AI Verified source (Sep 3, 2024)

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  Evan Hubinger

  Research scientist at Anthropic working on model organisms of misalignment; former Research Fellow at MIRI.

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  votes For and says:

  AI labs put out RSP commitments to stop scaling when particular capabilities benchmarks are hit, resuming only when they are able to hit particular safety/alignment/security targets. [...] For later capabilities levels, however, it is explicit in all...

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  Peter N. Salib

  Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Houston Law Center researching constitutional law, economics, and artificial intelligence.

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  votes For and says:

  If the foregoing arguments are right, then scenario three (risk apprehension, self-improvement, alignment) is the most likely of the six. This suggests a concrete near-term prediction: Contrary to standard arguments, when AIs achieve average human-le...

  more AI Verified source (May 16, 2023)

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  Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

  2023 Future of Life Institute open letter calling for a pause on AI training runs more powerful than GPT-4.

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  votes For and says:

  Therefore, we call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. This pause should be public and verifiable, and include all key actors. If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, gover...

  more AI Verified source (Mar 22, 2023)

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Against (7)

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  Dean W. Ball

  Author of Hyperdimensional

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  votes Against and says:

  I would also say the development of this technology is a national security priority, and it seems really hard to... it seems like a really big cost to impose something where we would self-consciously slow ourselves down when others are not doing that...

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  Nora Belrose

  AI alignment and interpretability researcher; former Head of Interpretability at EleutherAI and AI pause critic.

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  votes Against and says:

  Should we lobby governments to impose a moratorium on AI research? Since we don’t enforce pauses on most new technologies, I hope the reader will grant that the burden of proof is on those who advocate for such a moratorium. We should only advocate f...

  more AI Verified source (Oct 23, 2023)

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  Marc Andreessen

  General Partner at a16z (VC), co-founder of Netscape

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  votes Against and says:

  Big AI companies should be allowed to build AI as fast and aggressively as they can [...] Startup AI companies should be allowed to build AI as fast and aggressively as they can. [...] Open source AI should be allowed to freely proliferate and compet...

  more AI Verified source (Jun 6, 2023)

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  John Villasenor

  UCLA professor; Brookings senior fellow

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  votes Against and says:

  Regardless of what policies the U.S. adopts, the technology of large AI systems is going to continue to advance at a global level. It is far better for the U.S. to remain at the forefront of AI—advancing the state of the art, and using that knowledge...

  more AI Verified source (Apr 11, 2023)

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  Yann LeCun

  Computer scientist, AI researcher

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  votes Against and says:

  Well, my first reaction to this is that calling for a delay in research and development smacks me of a new wave of obscurantism, essentially, like why slow down the progress of knowledge and science? Then there is the question of products, like, you ...

  more AI Verified source (Apr 9, 2023)

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  Andrew Ng

  Baidu; Stanford CS faculty; founded Coursera and Google Brain

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  votes Against and says:

  But the idea of asking AI labs to slow down just doesn't seem practical or implementable to me. Especially in this frankly competitive business environment with labs and countries trying to build advanced technologies and creating a lot of value. And...

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  Eliezer Yudkowsky

  AI researcher and writer

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  votes Against and says:

  The moratorium on new large training runs needs to be indefinite and worldwide. There can be no exceptions, including for governments or militaries. [...] Shut down all the large GPU clusters (the large computer farms where the most powerful AIs are ...

  more AI Verified source (Apr 7, 2023)

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