Frontier AI labs are pushing for regulatory frameworks that they claim prioritize safety—things like capability checkpoints, coordinated development pacing, and restrictions on model distillation and Chinese compute access. The author's core argument: these safety rationales mask a straightforward financial incentive. Regulation that slows everyone down equally protects labs from the prisoner's dilemma where one company that voluntarily slows down gets crushed by competitors racing ahead. Dario Amodei's proposal for "coordinated pacing without sacrificing commercial advantage" is the tell. Binding limits on rivals make restraint profitable. The author isn't denying that some researchers genuinely worry about existential AI risk—just that their employers have massive financial skin in the game, so their policy recommendations deserve hard scrutiny rather than deference. The economics are brutal. Frontier model prices halve roughly every 46 days as newer, cheaper alternatives arrive. When GPT-6 Astra costs $1.72 per task versus Fable 5's $8.75 for comparable performance, customers switch fast. Regulation that delays new model releases lets labs extract higher margins from existing products longer. The data shows this isn't theoretical—the author tracked pricing across multiple flagship releases and found consistent exponential decline in what customers actually pay for equivalent capability. Slowing the pipeline directly extends the window where premium-priced models remain competitive. The market splits into two different games. Quality-conscious customers (OpenAI and Anthropic's main target) will pay more for better performance. Cost-conscious customers (where Chinese providers compete) care only about price per successful task. These segments have different dynamics, and regulation that works for one doesn't necessarily constrain the other. The article cuts off mid-thought, but the implication is clear: regulatory schemes designed by frontier labs protect their position in quality markets while potentially leaving cost-conscious competition unchecked—which is convenient for the companies pushing those regulations.