The ability to make arbitrary public binding precommitments seems like a powerful tool for solving coordination problems.
We'd like to be able to commit to cooperating with anyone who will cooperate with us, as in the open-source prisoner's dilemma (although this simple case is still an open problem, AFAIK). But we should be able to do this piece-meal.
It seems like we are moving in this direction, with things like Etherium that enable smart contracts. Technology should enable us to enforce more real-world precommitments, since we'll be able to more easily monitor and make public our private data.
Optimistically, I think this could allow us to solve coordination issues robustly enough to have a very low probability of any individual actor making an unsafe AI. This would require a lot of people to make the right kind of precommitments.
I'm guesing there are a lot of potential downsides and ways it could go wrong, which y'all might want to point out.
We already have legal contracts to do this. If I make a website and sell a product I however people to cooperate. They can make a contract with me and then I am precommitted to deliever them the product they paid for.
Contracts are limited in what they can include, and require a government to enforce them.