Could Frontier AI Researchers Collectively Slow the Race? A Conditional Pledge Mechanism

Overview. This is a project proposal and early research on the question of how and whether Frontier AI researchers (not companies themselves) might take on personal risk and pledge to conditionally pause AI development. I am looking for feedback on whether there’s a version of this that researchers might find palatable, and if so what the details might look like. I am especially interested in hearing from people with experience in frontier AI development or doing similar advocacy and outreach work. My specific questions are here. Many AI researchers have concerns about the risks of continuing the race toward AGI and ASI capabilities, but continue to advance the research, for any number of reasons. The public may be making unwarranted inferences about the severity of risks and harms based on the fact that the researchers in the frontier labs, those who theoretically know the technology best, continue to work on it.I hypothesize that at least part of the reason that researchers continue to work on technology they have concerns about is that they may feel powerless to change the trajectory on their own. I propose that, with the right mechanism in place, they could change the trajectory collectively. Here I propose a collective pledge mechanism where individual researchers would agree to temporarily step away from AI capability work for some number of months if enough of their peers across all frontier labs made the same pledge. The goal with such a work stoppage would be to temporarily slow the race and call public and governmental attention to the urgency of governing AI in a way that is consistent with how societies and governments deal with other significant risks to human safety and wellbeing.My inspiration comes partly from the recent mirror life moratorium, where researchers in synthetic biology voluntarily agreed to halt a cool line of work they had pioneered, due to the potential for catastrophic risk they didn’t feel they could rule out, or control once the tech