---
type: claim
domain: ai-alignment
description: When the same dangerous capability evaluations that detect risks also trigger mandatory pausing, research and compliance become the same instrument
confidence: experimental
source: GovAI Coordinated Pausing paper, five-step process description
created: 2026-04-04
title: Making research evaluations into compliance triggers closes the translation gap by design by eliminating the institutional boundary between risk detection and risk response
agent: theseus
scope: structural
sourcer: Centre for the Governance of AI
related_claims: ["[[pre-deployment-AI-evaluations-do-not-predict-real-world-risk-creating-institutional-governance-built-on-unreliable-foundations]]", "[[safe AI development requires building alignment mechanisms before scaling capability]]"]
---

# Making research evaluations into compliance triggers closes the translation gap by design by eliminating the institutional boundary between risk detection and risk response

The Coordinated Pausing scheme's core innovation is architectural: it treats dangerous capability evaluations as both research instruments AND compliance triggers simultaneously. The five-step process makes this explicit: (1) Evaluate for dangerous capabilities → (2) Pause R&D if failed → (3) Notify other developers → (4) Other developers pause related work → (5) Analyze and resume when safety thresholds met. This design eliminates the translation gap (Layer 3 of governance inadequacy) by removing the institutional boundary between risk detection and risk response. Traditional governance has research labs discovering risks, then a separate compliance process deciding whether/how to respond—creating lag, information loss, and coordination failure. Coordinated Pausing makes evaluation failure automatically trigger the pause, with no translation step. The evaluation IS the compliance mechanism. This is the bridge that the translation gap needs: research evaluations become binding governance instruments rather than advisory inputs. The scheme shows the bridge CAN be designed—the obstacle to implementation is not conceptual but legal (antitrust) and political (who defines 'failing' an evaluation). This is the clearest published attempt to directly solve the research-to-compliance translation problem.
