Abstract

There is increasing interest in an international pause of frontier AI training that is mutually verifiable by participating states. This report studies the feasibility of a hardwired pause, a type of pause in which a prohibition on frontier training is mutually verified through monitoring of and constraints on AI hardware. Like other plans for a pause, it involves monitoring AI chips that are capable of frontier AI training. But to support a durable pause lasting a decade or longer, the hardwired pause goes further in two ways. First, it stops the production of training-capable chips during the pause. Second, over time it phases out the pre-pause stock of training-capable chips, which constitute “dry tinder” for a resumed AI race. It replaces training-capable chips with inference-only chips, which can run approved AI models for inference, potentially at much higher speeds and with much greater energy efficiency, but cannot practically train new frontier AI models, due to the way the chips are constructed. If successful, this replacement—together with other mitigations against harms from deployed AI systems—would allow the diffusion of inference on existing models while avoiding the additional risks to economic and social well-being and to national security posed by the training of increasingly powerful models. We assess that a hardwired pause would be feasible to implement now or in the near future, if world leaders wanted to pause, and that its durability would depend on geopolitical and technical conditions that we analyze in the report.