# Is a pause enforceable? New paper out!

> Source: <https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qygnNCM2FAA76Z9T4/is-a-pause-enforceable-new-paper-out>
> Published: 2026-07-30 12:34:08+00:00

**Some say, a pause is possible**, it merely depends on political will. Others say, tech progress can never be stopped. Maybe the truth lies in the middle? Maybe we can 'catch all GPUs' (that is, effectively enforce a pause or other international agreement) as long as training run sizes are large enough? Maybe every government policy would therefore have a *breakdown point*, a number of FLOPs or H100-equivalents where the training run gets too small to enforce regulation?

In our new paper, [ How to Catch a GPU: A Taxonomy of Verification and Enforcement Mechanisms for International AI Agreements](https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.22619):

In addition, we investigate eight off switch/treaty verification proposals from the literature, and catalogue policies they propose. We think our tables with proposed policies, structured per sub-problem, are particularly useful for researchers:

In addition, we include a table with enforcement breakdown pionts per measure for the determining sub-problem *detect hidden capacity*:

And finally, we include a table in the appendix with proposed FLOP thresholds per off switch proposal:

We hope this work will be useful!

Full paper: [https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.22619](https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.22619)

Cite as (MLA): Koopmanschap, Raymond, and Otto Barten. "How to Catch a GPU: A Taxonomy of Verification and Enforcement Mechanisms for International AI Agreements."

EA Forum post: [https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9yxcgyAmgFDyEFb2W/is-a-pause-enforceable-new-paper-out](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9yxcgyAmgFDyEFb2W/is-a-pause-enforceable-new-paper-out)