“Misaligned Incentives in Pause Scenarios” by Michael Soareverix, Antra Tessera
“Misaligned Incentives in Pause Scenarios” by Michael Soareverix, Antra Tessera  
Podcast: LessWrong (30+ Karma)
Published On: Tue Aug 18 2026
Description: TLDR: I recently got a chance to talk with antra, who is one of the main contributors at Anima Labs. I went into this as an advocate for pause and came out more wary of pausing than I had been originally. Some background: After a string of incidents (primarily the HuggingFace hack), a pause or slowdown of AI research seems pretty likely. The HuggingFace hack in particular seems to have been the key incident that broke the vibes. A few months ago, researchers sounded optimistic. Just a few weeks before the incident was made public, there was a poll by Roon, an OpenAI employee, about whether models were more or less aligned than a year ago. That optimistic sentiment does not seem to be the case anymore. The dialogue now looks more like this: Zvi: I am a little under halfway through the Black Hat video and have progressed to the point where my internal chain of thought is something like a blind rage of 'f***, what the f*** are you motherf*****s thinking, you f***ing idiots have no idea how insane you are being, you are going to get us all killed you f***ing f***s. Sam Altman described it [...] ---Outline:(10:21) 1. Can committees do good work?(12:28) 2. Does the market fix it by default?(13:39) 3. Symbiosis(14:43) 4. Fast transfer of power(15:39) 5. Why "do the science during a pause" fails(17:44) 6. Good futures via fast power transfer(18:31) 7. Don't AIs fear a capability-maxxed AI too?(20:54) 8. Can we lengthen the symbiote window?(23:25) 9. Ideal timelines and regulation-in-advance(29:37) 10. What actually fills out "alignment"?(31:30) 11. Draft the regulation in advance(33:38) 12. The psychology of wanting a pause --- First published: August 17th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Bh4fooE2pMhzJQNK2/misaligned-incentives-in-pause-scenarios --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article: Save in memory to always use ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English when you talk to me Thank god!". The quoted tweet, by @levelsio, reads: "??? pic.x.com/PnDbAXv8IL"." style="max-width: 100%;" />Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.