This very much sounds like a West-only AI cartel proposal and, in fact, if you read Dario's essay - under the very telling "pacing within democracies" chapter - he specifically says he'd need the US government to issue an "antitrust waiver" for this.

The plan transparently looks like this: agree among themselves not to compete too hard, get an antitrust waiver to make it legal, and while they're at it, get Washington - under the veneer of "safety" - to kneecap Chinese competitors because only "democratic" models can be in this "safe pacing" club.

I'm not even exaggerating: Dario pretty much writes this explicitly.

There are 3 steps to his plan and step 2 is literally: "Frontier AI companies within democratic countries coordinate to establish common safety standards as well as limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress" -> the "unchecked AI progress" that would need "limits" is simply AI progress that happens outside their agreement. Another word for it is simply competition.

He also explicitly writes that "a key part of pacing within democracies is to keep democracies’ AI lead over autocracies as large as possible." You can't possibly be clearer than this

https://nitter.kareem.one/RnaudBertrand/status/2099019556769656854