Last week, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei argued that AI companies need to “pace the frontier,” slowing how quickly they make their most powerful models more capable, and Sam Altman agreed. The article frames the AI race as a prisoner’s dilemma: OpenAI and Anthropic are spending billions of dollars trying to beat each other for the same users, developers, talent and the chance to build AGI first, and both would probably prefer a world where everyone spends more time testing models instead of shipping the next capability jump as fast as possible, which gives both enough time to prep up for enterprise adoption, which has been abysmally slow. But neither can afford to slow down alone, so both keep racing and can end up doing something neither actually wants to do. Dario’s proposal is interesting because if the major AI labs agree on common tests, let outside groups inspect their models and agree on when to slow down, they can change the game, with OpenAI no longer having to worry that Anthropic will use its six-month pause to race ahead and Anthropic getting the same comfort about OpenAI. But there is a third prisoner not sitting at the table: over the last two years, Chinese labs have become a serious force in open AI, with DeepSeek changing the discussion around the cost of building capable models, Alibaba’s Qwen family becoming one of the most widely used open model families, and Moonshot, Zhipu and others continuing to push models that