Governing AI Beyond the Pretraining Frontier

Abstract: This year, jurisdictions worldwide, including the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and China, are set to enact or revise laws governing frontier AI. Their efforts largely rely on the assumption that increasing model scale through pretraining is the path to more advanced AI capabilities. Yet growing evidence suggests that this "pretraining paradigm" may be hitting a wall and major AI companies are turning to alternative approaches, like inference-time "reasoning," to boost capabilities instead. This paradigm shift presents fundamental challenges for the frontier AI governance frameworks that target pretraining scale as a key bottleneck useful for monitoring, control, and exclusion, threatening to undermine this new legal order as it emerges. This essay seeks to identify these challenges and point to new paths forward for regulation. First, we examine the existing frontier AI regulatory regime and analyze some key traits and vulnerabilities. Second, we introduce the concept of the "pretraining frontier," the capabilities threshold made possible by scaling up pretraining alone, and demonstrate how it could make the regulatory field more diffuse and complex and lead to new forms of competition. Third, we lay out a regulatory approach that focuses on increasing transparency and leveraging new natural technical bottlenecks to effectively oversee changing frontier AI development while minimizing regulatory burdens and protecting fundamental rights. Our analysis provides concrete mechanisms for governing frontier AI systems across diverse technical paradigms, offering policymakers tools for addressing both current and future regulatory challenges in frontier AI.