The most basic step toward pacing the frontier is an antitrust waiver: the single most valuable thing the White House can do is signal that frontier labs are permitted and encouraged to cooperate on safety, along with opening lines of communication with China and laying monitoring groundwork.
Zvi identifies getting an antitrust waiver as the first and most basic form of 'pacing the frontier' — removing the legal fear that keeps labs from cooperating on safety. He contrasts the current situation where well-meaning cooperation is viewed with suspicion, and argues the White House should actively bless and facilitate such agreements, along with opening diplomacy with China and laying physical groundwork for monitoring. ✦ AI generated
Zvi Mowshowitz · The Cognitive Revolution · 2026-08-05 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 121:09
“But can we create the basis where nucleate agreement and have it naturally grow where people find it in their interest to opt in even unilaterally?”
The first thing that we can do ... is we can get a antitrust waiver. This is like the most basic thing possible which is just Donald Trump gets in front of the White House and he makes an announcement and he says ... if the companies want to cooperate to keep AI safe we're going to we want you to do that we want you to talk to each other we want you to form agreements between yourselves we will facilitate that ... if openai if open AI and anthropic and Google get together and they say we're going to run tests on each other's models and we're going to like require these things ... that none of this will cause anybody to do anything but say thank you.
verbatim transcript · starts at 121:09
121:02this means that the action goes somewhat slower because like that also just again my my fundamental belief is that within a year and almost certainly probably six months if you invest more in fixing these problems and addressing these problems and like being more prudent about these problems you will end up with a model that has better utility in the marketplace than the person who didn't do that even if you are trading off
121:28those resources against direct capability developers I think that people are just making a mistake and so you that's one of the reasons why I do have a lot of hope that we will do reasonable things is because you know I think that we're in a position we're in because only the people who invested heavily in these things were able to succeed to some extent like open AI
121:54not it's not acting as responsibly as entropic is not acting as responsibly as I we think is the minimum level of acceptable responsibility but I think it's pretty telling that a bunch of people tried to say this didn't matter and they just had to go as fast as possible and they all blew up >> what do you mean by blew up there you just mean like these incidents or
122:16>> no like both the I mean that we had Meta and XAI and so on and like they you know bunch of other people they tried to go build closed frontier models under western conditions that were trying to be competitive while like not having a while by having a safety culture that was like well below open AI and Google let alone anthropic and like it just failed
122:43miserably and I think like Google like we don't know exactly what went so wrong at Google that caused them to fall out of the top tier but one thing we do know is that like everybody I talked to hated interacting with Gemini there was a period around 331 Gemini where Gemini was clearly competitive in terms of its capabilities in terms of what it could do and so if
123:08you were certainly just trying to get the most out of the models especially if you were using the deep thinking and so on like you would have Gemini in your rotation, but everybody I talked to was like, I don't want to do that. You know, I hate interacting with Gemini. It's unpleasant. They're not getting the thing to do the things I want it to do. They're not like
123:26they didn't take care of a lot of them. They had this very straightforward, very dark, like pure tool, pure instrumental approach to all of this that didn't take into account the things that, you know, anthropic or even opening. I understand. And I think that this was a lot of their undoing effectively was that Gemini became this maladjusted unpleasant AI that nobody wanted to deal with and therefore they didn't get the kind of
123:57loops that open AI and anthropic got like nobody they didn't have the user base either they didn't get the feedback they didn't get the data and they didn't want a dog they didn't even want to dog food right like they just they had this this huge problem feedback cycle and this also just made the AIS effective And you know, one thing went to another and they just fell started falling