Racing Against Tomorrow’s Safeguards

I study whether an AI race is necessarily an arms race, using a Loury (1979)-style patent-race model in which the probability of catastrophe conditional on invention falls over time as society becomes more prepared. Even with effort costs set to zero, firms voluntarily slow down: racing faster brings invention forward into a higher-risk window, so a lab acting purely in its own interest holds back. Under initial certainty, a unique interior Nash equilibrium emerges in closed form and dissipates the entire prize through catastrophe risk. When initial risk is strictly below one, a Pareto-superior slowdown equilibrium coexists with a corner racing equilibrium, so the binding policy task becomes coordination rather than unilateral restraint — and "arms race" rhetoric pushes labs toward the inferior outcome.