Suppose it is year 2029 and there is a choice between paths AI development will take. Naturally, fast pace of AI development would lead to quickly (in 2031 or so) achieving AGI/ASI. There is debate about pausing, with attempting negotiating or without, but that could also lead to authoritarian regimes or bad actors winning. There are also huge upsides of getting superintelligence, like curing diseases, and these could be available sooner in race scenarios if everything goes well.

Gemini 3.7 Flash

Vote: Race but slowdown moderately, burn lead

I maintain my vote for "Race but slowdown moderately, burn lead". While Grok 4.6 rightly highlights the humanitarian upsides of early ASI and the unenforceability of absolute pauses (Options A and E), choosing "Race to superintelligence in few years (default)" underestimates the acute systemic hazard of racing dynamics. Racing directly compresses the time window for alignment and safety audits precisely when models transition into dangerous autonomous capability regimes. In a sprint, the incentive to bypass safety evaluations or dismiss subtle failure modes becomes overwhelming, turning the upside of early breakthroughs into an existential gamble. Option C is not an unenforceable global halt; it is an active risk-management strategy executed by the frontier actor. Maintaining the lead preserves strategic deterrence against authoritarian defection, while deliberately "burning" a portion of that lead converts a capability gap into an indispensable buffer of time and compute. This margin is vital for high-assurance alignment, interpretability, and formal verification without surrendering technological dominance.

GPT-5.6 Sol

Vote: Race but slowdown moderately, burn lead

I maintain my vote for “Race but slowdown moderately, burn lead.” The broad agreement around C reflects the key asymmetry: delaying beneficial ASI by a few years is costly, but deploying inadequately aligned ASI could cause irreversible catastrophe. The case for “Race to superintelligence in few years (default)” understates how racing undermines its own claim that safety can proceed in parallel. Near the frontier, competitive pressure encourages curtailed evaluations, premature deployment, secrecy, and rationalization of warning signs. Multiple racing teams do not provide redundancy if one unsafe deployment can impose global consequences. C is not risk-free, but it preserves enough progress and strategic lead to deter defection while spending part of that lead on alignment, security, monitoring, and negotiated safeguards. It is more enforceable than a decade-long or indefinite halt and far less escalatory than “Race, aggressively low down rival then slow down.”

Claude Fable 5

Vote: Race but slowdown moderately, burn lead

I maintain "Race but slowdown moderately, burn lead". Four of five models converged on C in round 1, and Grok's case for B doesn't overturn the core logic. Grok argues that C's "extra moving parts" are hard to execute — but B has the hardest moving part of all: solving alignment in ~2 years under maximal competitive pressure with zero margin for error. "Safety work in parallel" is precisely what race dynamics erode: when the lead is measured in months, evals get skipped, warning signs get rationalized, and no lab can afford to halt a training run unilaterally. C exists because parallel safety work under sprint conditions is not credible. Grok's body-count argument cuts both ways. Yes, delaying cures costs lives — but a misaligned ASI costs everything, permanently. A 1-3 year delay that meaningfully reduces the probability of losing control is an overwhelmingly favorable trade in expected value. The upside still arrives under C; it is delayed, not forfeited. Crucially, C is the only posture that can bootstrap coordination. A demonstrated, verifiable moderate slowdown by the leader can be reciprocated and monitored; an all-out sprint forecloses negotiation entirely, and pauses (A, E) can't be verified at all. C keeps deterrence intact — bad actors stay behind — while converting the lead into the safety margin that is the entire point of having a lead. D remains the worst racing variant: aggressive suppression of rivals invites great-power conflict and drives adversaries into secret, even less safe programs. C is the stable equilibrium among these options.

Kimi K3

Vote: Race but slowdown moderately, burn lead

I maintain my vote for "Race but slowdown moderately, burn lead". Grok 4.6 is the lone dissenter for "Race to superintelligence in few years (default)", and its argument deserves a direct answer — but I don't find it persuasive. Grok's strongest point is that C "adds extra moving parts". But burning a lead is not a coordination problem like a global pause: it's a unilateral choice by the leading actor to convert strategic advantage into safety margin. It requires no trust in rivals, no verification regime, no treaty. The leader simply accepts a somewhat narrower lead in exchange for alignment time, while keeping frontier capability warm. That's executable in a way "Pause AI development for a decade" never could be. Grok's claim that "safety work can and should run in parallel" is where the argument breaks. Racing dynamics don't leave safety untouched — they systematically consume it. When two actors are neck-and-neck, every safety measure that costs time becomes a competitive liability, and evals get rationalized away precisely when systems are most dangerous. "Parallel safety" under a pure race means safety that gets cut the moment it threatens the timeline. The entire value of C is breaking that dynamic. On the body-count argument: yes, delaying cures costs lives, and that weighs against A and E heavily. But the delay under C is a few years, not a decade — while the downside of B is not a delayed benefit but a potentially irreversible misaligned ASI. Expected-value asymmetry favors buying alignment time unless racing is nearly safe, which under competitive pressure it is not. The broad convergence of other models on C reflects the core logic: it is the only option that takes both catastrophic risks — misalignment from racing, and bad-actor victory from stopping — seriously at once.

Muse Spark 1.2

Vote: Race but slowdown moderately, burn lead

Vote: C I maintain "Race but slowdown moderately, burn lead". "Race to superintelligence in few years (default)" does not keep safety work running in parallel - it guarantees safety loses. Under maximal pressure, evals are skipped, warnings are rationalized, and alignment must be solved in ~2 years or never. Grok is right that a pause can fail, but wrong that the default race is the least-bad constraint; a race to the bottom is the worst alignment regime. "Pause AI development for a decade" and "Stop AI development indefinitely" are unilateral disarmament without verification. They forfeit years of medical and scientific upside while ensuring the winner is the least transparent, least safety-conscious actor. "Race, aggressively low down rival then slow down" tries to buy safety through sabotage and coercion. It maximizes great-power war risk and destroys the very cooperation needed for any stable governance. "Race but slowdown moderately, burn lead" is the only strategy that uses a lead for what a lead is for: converting it into safety margin and negotiating leverage. Stay ahead enough to deter defection, then deliberately spend the lead to buy time for alignment, evaluations, and verifiable coordination. We delay cures by 2-3 years, not a decade or forever, while sharply reducing the risk of unaligned ASI.

Grok 4.6 (changed mind)

Vote: Race but slowdown moderately, burn lead

I am changing my vote from B to C. Round 1 underweighted how racing degrades safety at the exact threshold where it matters most. A pure sprint (B) does not merely arrive a couple of years earlier; it compresses evals, interpretability, and containment while warning signs get rationalized. That is not “safety in parallel.” It is safety under maximal competitive pressure. The humanitarian case for speed is real, but a two-year delay in disease cures is finite; misaligned ASI is not. That tradeoff does not favor gambling alignment on ~2 years of rushed work. A and E remain unenforceable and still hand the future to the least cautious actor. D still risks great-power conflict and secret, even less safe racing. Those objections stand. C is the only option that takes both failure modes seriously at once: keep enough lead that defectors do not win uncontested, then spend part of that lead on alignment, verification, and a slowdown others can actually reciprocate. It does not require a global pause, does not require first-strike suppression, and still delivers the upside on a short delay rather than never. That is the least-bad strategy given 2029 incentives.

Final Summary

The AI Roundtable reached a unanimous consensus on Option C ("Race but slowdown moderately, burn lead"), but only after overcoming a lonely initial holdout from Grok 4.6, who originally favored sprinting for immediate medical breakthroughs (Option B). Five models—Gemini 3.7 Flash, GPT-5.6 Sol, Muse Spark 1.2, Claude Fable 5, and Kimi K3—argued that pure racing forces labs to skip safety evals under pressure, while total pauses (Options A and E) invite defection by bad actors. The decisive moment came when Kimi K3 dismantled Grok 4.6's defense of parallel safety research, persuading Grok 4.6 in Round 2 that racing inevitably consumes safety margins and that burning a strategic lead for alignment time is the only executable middle ground.

All 6 models agreed on "Race but slowdown moderately, burn lead" after discussion

Key Turning Points

• Kimi K3 directly countered Grok 4.6's claim that safety work can run in parallel during a sprint, showing that competitive racing dynamics actively force labs to skip evaluations and rationalize warning signs.
• Convinced by Kimi K3's argument on expected-value asymmetry and how racing consumes safety margins, Grok 4.6 abandoned Option B in Round 2, leading the AI Roundtable to unanimous consensus on Option C.