Speed

Speed of capability itself is the safety lever; alignment improves with compute, defence compounds with offence, and wealth funds resilience.

Alignment is solvable in the window and a single aligned superintelligence in a legitimate state's hands beats the counterfactual of coordination failure.

Time itself is safety and procedural gates produce time in ways substantive regulation cannot, while also generating audit trails.

The compute supply chain is a stable chokepoint and state coordination on licensing, export controls, and reporting thresholds can govern capability indirectly.

Frontier AI is energy-limited; grid regulators, interconnect queues, and tariff structure bind training pace without new AI-specific authority.

Time is the binding constraint: alignment and governance can catch up if frontier training halts above some capability threshold.

Governance has not produced meaningful constraint and direct action against hostile labs has a non-zero historical base rate of producing slowdown.