What if Anthropic unilaterally paused capabilities development right now?

In their new post on recursive self-improvement, Anthropic argues that a pause in frontier AI development is needed, but unfortunately, they can't pause on their own, because of less cautious actors: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. ...A meaningful slowdown or pause would require multiple well-resourced labs at or near the frontier, in multiple countries, agreeing to stop under the same conditions. It would also require that each can verify that the others have actually stopped. ...None of this is necessarily impossible in principle—the world has built verification regimes for other complex technologies (e.g., the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty)—but those regimes took decades to build both the infrastructure and the trust. We don’t have that long. A unilateral pause by one lab, by contrast, is achievable immediately, but accomplishes much less: it would change who the front-runner is, but it would not create the wider deliberative process that is currently missing.As many have pointed out, this reads a lot like lip service. But it sounds plausible: Anthropic seems to be the most safety-concerned lab right now, so the future would look worse if they weren't in the lead anymore because they paused unilaterally and a less cautious actor overtook them, right?I think this is fundamentally wrong, because it ignores many of the actual or possible effects of a unilateral pause.Mythos seems to have been a wake-up call for many, especially in governments around the world. For example, in response to Mythos, the president of the German Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik, Claudia Plattner, called for a German AI Safety Institute - something I have always thought was necessary, but wouldn't have deemed very likely before.It probably weren't the hacking capabilities of the new