Big AI wrote its own regulation and called it "pace the frontier"
Issue #036 · 4 min read
Big AI wrote its own regulation and called it "pace the frontier"
Amodei, Altman, Nadella and Musk agree on the rules. Gartner says none of it is ready for your company.
The big story
Four people who run AI companies just agreed on how AI should be regulated.
Amodei, Altman, Nadella and Musk are aligned on a framework they're calling "pace the frontier," according to The Register.
That's four competitors, usually happy to trash each other's models, agreeing on the one thing that decides whether anyone can catch up to them.
The framing makes it sound technical. It isn't.
It's a proposal for who gets to write the rules for an industry, submitted by the industry.
The same outlet ran a companion piece the same day arguing the doom warnings driving this push are "a self-serving attempt at regulatory capture" — the pitch is: this technology is too dangerous for anyone but us to handle safely.
Meanwhile in Washington, the reception is mixed at best. Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson think the industry is overreacting, per The Verge, while Obama is telling Democrats the opposite — get a clear plan for AI safeguards, and soon, says TechCrunch.
Two former presidents, two opposite instincts, and four AI CEOs who'd rather write the answer themselves before either party gets there first.
For a PM, none of this changes your sprint. But it will eventually decide what you're allowed to ship, and who you have to ask first. Worth fifteen minutes to read the actual framework rather than the summary of it.
What shipped
GitHub added VS Code Agents to Copilot usage metrics, now generally available across enterprises and orgs — details here.
If you've been asked "is anyone actually using Copilot agents" and had no good answer, you now do. This is the kind of unglamorous release that actually earns its place on a roadmap review.
Copilot code review now resolves its own comments once you fix them, and writes its own commit messages when you accept a suggestion — changelog.
Small, but it's the difference between a review tool that nags and one that closes the loop. Worth a look if your team already has Copilot review turned on and is annoyed by the busywork around it.
OpenAI is positioning GPT-6 Astra as something you supervise rather than operate. Perplexity is now using it to write communications, ship code, and monitor production systems while "checking in much less frequently than with earlier models," and Cognition is using it inside Devin so engineers can review less code, according to two posts from OpenAI and OpenAI again.
Both are customer testimonials, not independent audits, so read the "much less frequently" claim as marketing until someone outside OpenAI measures it. But if you run an eng org, the direction is the same one you've been watching all quarter: less human review per unit of shipped code, and the trust threshold for that keeps dropping.
What I'd actually do this week
Pull up your Copilot usage metrics dashboard now that VS Code Agents activity is in there — even if you don't act on it yet, you want a baseline before someone asks you for one.
If your org runs Copilot code review, turn on auto-resolution and see how much reviewer time it actually saves versus how much it just hides.
Read the "pace the frontier" framework yourself rather than a summary of it — if your company will be affected by AI policy in the next year, fifteen minutes now beats finding out from a press release later.
Tell me what you're seeing on your end — reply and let me know.
Tools mentioned
- GitHub Copilot usage metrics
- Copilot code review auto-resolution
- GPT-6 Astra Perplexity
- GPT-6 Astra Devin/Cognition