The Hobbesian Bootstrap Paradox in Frontier AI

Published on September 14, 2026 2:14 PM GMTEpistemic status: I am confident in the coordination-problem diagnosis; considerably less confident in the specific enforcement architecture, which I expect to be substantially wrong in its current form (see sections 6 and 7). The bottleneck is not the architecture, it's whether the actors who'd need to negotiate are willing to sit down at all. If that ever happens, the technical work could be the easy part. Section 8 has what I'm actually asking for. T...