If future legislation requires AI control to meet some standards before labs can continue training, I think we should require that it can be met using only control models/protocols that are at least x months old.
Forces better epistemics by forcing the labs to strategically think about how much resources to invest into safety pegged to their actual expectations of how hard the problem will be in the future
incentivizes research into monitorability that generalizes out of distribution. Labs would have to develop monitors today that work on future models whose failure modes they don’t yet know and meet safety requirements that might change in the meantime.
Any reasonable requirement set this way would automatically become stricter in worlds where capabilities grow faster than expected, which is hard to do otherwise.
New failure modes in monitors and frontier models would become less correlated.
Fitting x for current danger levels I would say x ≈ 12 months, Astra-class models shouldn't be allowed to continue training if we deem GPT-5 too weak to be a CoT monitor for them, e.g., if it wouldn't have flagged the Hugging Face incident.