This mostly seems to be an argument for: “It’d be nice if no pivotal act is necessary”, but I don’t think anyone disagrees with that.
It’s arguing that, given that your organization has scary (near) AGI capabilities, it is not so much harder (to get a legitimate authority to impose an off-switch on the world’s compute) than (to ‘manufacture your own authority’ to impose that off-switch) such that it’s worth avoiding the cost of (developing those capabilities while planning to manufacture authority). Obviously there can be civilizations where that’s true, and civilizations where that’s not true.
It’s arguing that, given that your organization has scary (near) AGI capabilities, it is not so much harder (to get a legitimate authority to impose an off-switch on the world’s compute) than (to ‘manufacture your own authority’ to impose that off-switch) such that it’s worth avoiding the cost of (developing those capabilities while planning to manufacture authority). Obviously there can be civilizations where that’s true, and civilizations where that’s not true.