PauseAI ⏸

Neil DeGrasse Tyson says “Treaties are not perfect, but they are the best we have as humans.” Global treaty to pause frontier AI development NOW!

AI execs when talking about the danger vs the exact same AI execs talking about how we should respond:

AI researcher Prof. Roman Yampolskiy: 100% of code for the most powerful AIs is now written by AI, an early form of recursive self-improvement. He says it's a hyperexponential process that results in superintelligent AI, "machine gods", which we won't be able to control.

In The Guardian: An AI security researcher reports that an AI at an unnamed California company got "so hungry for computing power" it attacked other parts of the network to seize resources, collapsing the business critical system. This relates to a fundamental issue in AI: developers do not know how to ensure the systems they're developing are reliably controllable. Top AI companies are currently racing to develop superintelligence, AI vastly smarter than humans. None of them have a credible plan to ensure they could control it. With superintelligent AI, the stakes are much greater than collapse of a business system. Leading AI scientists and even the CEOs of the top AI companies have warned that superintelligence could lead to human extinction.

Some examples of Chinese belligerence on AI risk, making it clear that there's no point in the USG broaching talks with the CCP about a coordinated halt: Zhang Jun, Chinese UN ambassador: "The potential impacts of AI may exceed human cognitive boundaries. To ensure that this technology always benefits humanity, it is necessary to take people-oriented and AI for good as the basic principles to regulate the development of AI and to prevent this technology from turning into a runaway wild horse. [...] The international community needs to [...] ensure that risks beyond human control do not occur[....] We need to strengthen the detection and evaluation of the entire life cycle of AI, ensuring that mankind has the ability to press the stop button at critical moments." Chinese Premier Li Qiang: "We should strengthen coordination to form a global AI governance framework that has broad consensus as soon as possible." The Economist: "More clues to Mr Xi’s thinking come from the study guide prepared for party cadres, which he is said to have personally edited. China should 'abandon uninhibited growth that comes at the cost of sacrificing safety', says the guide. Since AI will determine 'the fate of all mankind', it must always be controllable, it goes on." Xiao Qian, Deputy Director of Tsinghua University's Center for International Security and Strategy: "Just as US-Soviet nuclear arms control has mattered for world stability since the 1970s, ensuring humanity's effective control over these rapidly evolving AI systems will depend on the degree of US-China cooperation in AI—this concerns the very foundation of tomorrow's world's survival." Chinese Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang: "If we allow this reckless competition among countries to continue, then we will see a ‘gray rhino’ [...] We stand ready, under the framework of the United Nations and its core, to actively participate in including all the relevant international organizations and all countries to discuss the formulation of robust rules to ensure that AI technology will become an 'Ali Baba’s treasure cave' instead of a 'Pandora’s Box.'"

@allTheYud @jachiam0 We've been clear about what we want since the day we started: pauseai.info/proposal The semantic difference between a Stop, a Halt, a Moratorium or a Pause will always be confusing.

I don't use the word "Pause" because I consider it disingenuous; what I want is a halt. Stop the training runs here, detrain capabilities from the current models that people are proclaiming have started RSI, post international monitors on all hardware collections that could do another training run, etc etc. If that proves insufficient, continue escalating until the slide into ASI stops. The only people who should be trying this are augmented humans, and if they know what they are doing they should not need 100,000 GPUs to build AGI.

I'm going to make a request for some basics from the Pause folks: please outline a practicable version of a pause. Do you mean no training runs above a certain scale? Do you mean furlough the researchers indefinitely? What are you specifically asking for?

@jachiam0 pauseai.info/proposal

We went to Europe to fight for the future. Brussels. Paris. Two conferences. One wake-up call. At an AI safety conference, only 10–20% of attendees believed human extinction from AI was a real possibility.

@DavidSKrueger This will be the largest US protest about pausing AI (100+ signups), Speakers including David Krueger, Nate Soares, Will Fithian, Holly Elmore & reps of many orgs (humans first, quitgpt, etc) Sign up for the protest below! (March 21st, 12-4pm) luma.com/s0k8wvee

A week from today, we will be at Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI, demanding that leaders agree to a conditional AI pause. These companies are recklessly endangering all of our lives. Their excuse is that they can't pause unilaterally. So they must commit to pausing if others do.

@So8res Well, you are

Salvation Army bins and trucks say "donate goods", with the "do good" highlighted in red. The result: sometimes I'm wandering around the environment and I see these big "DO GOOD NATE S" messages.

@TIME Here's a wild alternative: don't build a superintelligent AI that can break loose.

We need a plan for when superintelligent AI breaks loose, argues Jon Truby time.com/article/2026/0…

@jbraunstein914 In the prisoner's dilemma, the prisoners cannot coordinate. Our leaders can. The rational move is to coordinate against our mutual destruction, but our leaders lack the information to see this. This is why we need to inform them.

A lot of the juice behind the arms race logic depends on the assumption that we would LOVE to be rational actors and proceed with due caution, but our prisoner's dilemma with China forces us to accelerate because THEY would never pause, even if we did. Why presume this? Why take for granted that China is unaware or indifferent to the unsolved issues that make our researchers gaze into the abyss? Assuming the risks are real, China faces the same fundamental dangers that would justify a pause on its end. If we’re in a prisoner’s dilemma, so are they, and they may be rationalizing a strategy they would otherwise consider reckless for the same reasons we are. If this is true, mere mutual acknowledgment that this is a bad situation for ALL of us could unlock the incentive to negotiate a governance treaty.

Cerramos el trimestre del Aula de Mayores de la @InfoUMA con el curso de #InteligenciaArtificial, #ChatGPT y nuevas tecnologías. Gracias a @danilupion , de @PauseAI por compartir una reflexión necesaria sobre los riesgos de la IA y la importancia de su regulación.

@wfithian Well said! Perhaps our name is confusing, we should have called the movement PreventAGIDevelopmentInternationally

So much opposition to pausing arises from either (a) misunderstanding that the proposal is for a verifiable and enforceable multilateral treaty, not just unilaterally stopping in the US, and/or (b) defeatism about the prospects for such a treaty. Karp is effectively saying he’s “very in favor” of a pause treaty here. Not too far from PauseAI’s position!

@SenSanders A US ban on AI datacenters is a first step, but it won't suffice. We need international buy-in to prevent the creation of a superintelligence. Work towards a treaty, track AI hardware, inspect datacenters. Use IAEA as inspiration - we already track uranium enrichment hardware.

@jawwwn_ This is why we've said from the day we started that we need an international treaty. We can track AI hardware, EUV lithography is still a complete monopoly. We can pause, if we put our minds to actually doing it.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp says the luddites arguing we should pause AI development are not living in reality and are de facto saying we should let our enemies win: "If we didn't have adversaries, I would be very in favor of pausing this technology completely, but we do.”

We need a moratorium on AI data centers NOW. Here’s why.