RSP v3's substitution of non-binding Frontier Safety Roadmap for binding pause commitments instantiates Mutually Assured Deregulation at corporate voluntary governance level

Anthropic's RSP v3.0 replaced the binding pause commitment from RSP v2 ('if we cannot implement adequate mitigations before reaching ASL-X, we will pause') with a non-binding 'Frontier Safety Roadmap.' The company's stated rationale directly invokes Mutually Assured Deregulation logic: 'Stopping the training of AI models wouldn't actually help anyone if other developers with fewer scruples continue to advance' and 'Some commitments in the old RSP only make sense if they're matched by other companies.' This is the same mechanism that makes national-level restraint untenable—competitors will advance without restraint, so unilateral restraint means falling behind with no safety benefit. The timing is significant: RSP v3.0 was released on February 24, 2026, the same day Defense Secretary Hegseth gave CEO Dario Amodei a 5pm deadline to allow unrestricted military use of Claude. Whether causally linked or coincidental, the binding safety mechanism was converted to non-binding at the moment of maximum external coercive pressure. GovAI's evolution from 'rather negative' to 'more positive' after deeper engagement suggests the safety community normalized the change relatively quickly, with the conclusion that it's 'better to be honest about constraints than to keep commitments that won't be followed in practice.' This reveals MAD operates not just at the national or institutional level, but cascades down to corporate voluntary governance—the same competitive logic that prevents nations from maintaining unilateral restraint prevents individual companies from maintaining binding safety commitments.