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The Frontier Safety Pact Could Become Technology’s Most Powerful Cartel
Shared safety rules can reduce catastrophic risk while quietly concentrating power, information, and market control.
The most dangerous meeting in frontier technology may not be a secret exchange about prices. It may be a safety meeting.
That sounds backwards. Laboratories building increasingly capable systems need to share incident reports, compare evaluations, and coordinate when a new capability creates risks no single company can manage. A private safety body could prevent duplicated mistakes and give regulators an early warning system.
It could also become something more troubling: a trusted coordination layer where competitors exchange the information, timing, and enforcement tools needed to govern a market together.
The concern is not that every safety researcher is secretly plotting a cartel. The concern is structural. A small group of labs already shares incentives, investors, suppliers, senior staff, evaluation methods, and public language about slowing the frontier. Give that group privileged channels, common thresholds, confidential audits, and influence over who qualifies as a serious competitor, and the safety institution begins to resemble market…
