Ben Thompson names four overhangs that make "pacing the frontier" commercially convenient.

Stratechery's September 21 piece argues Anthropic's slowdown proposal happens to solve four existing problems. Capability overhang: Microsoft's multi-model Copilot Cowork harness saw low usage of Anthropic's Fable 5 because of a 30-day data retention requirement, so customers already choose on something other than raw performance. Product overhang: Meta's Muse shows a non-frontier model can build stickier lock-in than a better model. Pricing overhang: current prices reflect compute allocated to training, so slowing down enables price cuts. Capital overhang: revenue must outrun the funding runway. Thompson then inverts the safety case, arguing a pause preserves the attacker's current advantage over defenders.