The weekend’s big news story was a series of announcements by leading artificial intelligence (AI) firms agreeing to slow the development of AI tools. This came in the aftermath of a former Anthropic researcher’s warning that there was a high probability AI could kill all of humanity by 2030. Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind head Demis Hassabis,and xAI owner Elon Musk agreed to support Amodei’s proposal for slowing AI development.

I enjoy seeing CEOs join hands for a game of ring-around-the-apocalypse as much as the next guy, but this accomplishes nothing. After all, they did not agree to stop competing. So the right competitive strategy will be to develop just a little bit less slowly than the competitors, which means there is an ever-present pressure to develop faster, which is exactly what is going on right now.

And that leaves out the issue of what China will do, and I didn’t see any press releases from China over the weekend.

At the moment, it seems safe to say Congress has neither enough time nor bravery – let alone enough thoughtful policy development – to regulate the pace of advances. Count Congress out. The president is on record as having no concerns with the pace of development. Count the administration out.

That leaves the industry itself. A sensible next step would be to set up a self-regulatory organization (SRO). An SRO is an industry body that creates and enforces rules such as those that govern the pace of development. The members would have to agree to provide enough disclosure to ensure that development would be monitored. An SRO could operate under a government agency (e.g., the Federal Trade Commission or FTC). (As an example, Google released a white paper earlier this year calling for an SRO.) And the FTC should make sure its guidelines for competitor cooperation are revised to ensure the AI companies can coordinate in this manner.

At this juncture, doing nothing is not an option but most government solutions would likely be overreaching. The SRO is an appealing middle ground.