The joke will be on us all when your open-source powered mechwarriors start destroying dams and power plants and even take a stab at launching some nukes, because the models figured this is the most effective way to "get them", and weren't aligned enough to see why they should take a different approach.
While my tongue was firmly in my cheek, and still is somewhat, whats to stop (for example) Boston Dynamics and OpenAI collaborating and beating us to your nightmare scenario first? And is that a situation you would prefer?
I have a bridge to sell Yudkowsky and everyone else who believes that an "AI pause" is actually something that can happen.
Global treaties pretty much all occur with implied threats of violence, and we don't have enough guns to force this across India, China, the middle east, the EU, and the US. Major AI development happens in all of those places.
You're reading this wrong. Yudkowsky isn't saying that this will happen; in fact, it's apparent to him as much as to everyone else how unlikely is that.
Yudkowsky's point is that this is the minimum and least difficult thing we need to do. LeCun and others on both sides of the "AI regulation" argument are busy arguing the color of the carpet, while the whole house is on fire.
I think we all also fundamentally disagree about whether the house is on fire at all. History is littered with examples of Luddites yelling about how the bottom of a technological S-curve is actually an exponential and how we Must Do Something to prevent a catastrophe.
With possibly one exception (biological weapons, research on which seems to have few positive externalities) they have always been wrong. I did not mean nuclear weapons - we are seeing significant negative societal fallout from failing to invest in nuclear technology. So no, the house is almost certainly not on fire.
Lots of people recommend a pause, Yudkowsky explicitly argues that a pause is entirely inadequate and recommends an extreme anti-AI-research global crusade, so its kind of odd to point to him the way you have as a pause-recommender.