Is a pause enforceable? New paper out!

A new paper by Raymond Koopmanschap and Otto Barten, titled 'How to Catch a GPU: A Taxonomy of Verification and Enforcement Mechanisms for International AI Agreements,' argues that enforcing a pause on large AI training runs is possible if training runs are large enough, and introduces the concept of a 'breakdown point' in FLOPs or H100-equivalents below which regulation becomes unenforceable. The paper investigates eight off-switch proposals, catalogs policies per sub-problem, and provides tables with enforcement breakdown points and FLOP thresholds.

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