> They're afraid of running out of the capital necessary to stay in the race.

So, they're pacing themselves. And since they're the frontier roughly 33%+ of the time, they're "pacing the frontier" at least that much.

Less cynical and more true interpretation also holds: they are trying to slow down AI progres to give people better chance to keep up (see Hugging Face incident, and whatever was that Anthropic incident the other day). They'd ideally like the AI progress to stop soon, but of course they'd also like to come out ahead of everyone, so for various (more or less self-serving) reasons they don't want to close shop completely - hence, pacing.