If they believe it, they can stop. All of them. There's no sign though that any pacing/slowdown or whatever is in place, zero.
I don't think that's how the market works. Anti-slavery regulation didn't stop slavery either, just moved it abroad. Same for trash handling regulations, it's just shipped abroad. Falling behind on useful AI capability is obviously not in the interest of anyone, so either all players coordinate, or an arms race towards ??? it is.
It may very well be self serving what they're saying, but that doesn't mean it isn't simultaneously true.
There was a NYT piece about this recently. They are believers in a millennialist cult in which the arrival of an omnipotent machine-god is thought inevitable, and the only question is whether it will be "aligned" (good) or "misaligned" (evil).
They are the good heroes racing to make sure they bring forth the Aligned God because if they fail, surely the bad people will raise the Misaligned Devil.
Ref w/gift link https://x.com/sapinker/status/2096236079477096630
OpenAI claims to have paused the training of their ”most capable” models: https://apnews.com/article/ai-openai-anthropic-agents-rogue-...
Of course I am not making an argument for them being honest as there could be entirely other reasons to a pause (like financial ones). Just pointing out ”no signs of pacing” is not true