AI breakout time: a mechanism for an enforceable AI pause

The old Iran deal aimed to keep Iran at least one year away from having a nuclear bomb. Similar controls can be used to design an enforceable AI pause.[Note: this is probably a bit underspecified in a few places. I deliberately accelerated the pace at which I wrote this piece, so as to get it out to the public as far ahead as possible of the Trump-Xi summit in late September 2026, and get people thinking about the core idea if it's useful]To pause frontier AI development, you need to define the ...