For the past week, the AI industry has been ringing major alarm bells about the trajectory and pace of AI development. OpenAI just revealed that it has been working with its top competitors, Anthropic and Google DeepMind, on the problem for several weeks. OpenAI’s global head of policy Chris Lehane told Bloomberg that the top AI labs have been working together to “prioritize safety.”
Over the weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei released an essay, promptly supported by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, warning of potentially catastrophic outcomes if AI continues its unchecked pace of development and calling on the AI industry to slow down. In the essay, Amodei specifically calls on the U.S. government to “mediate or at least enable” the safety cooperation via a standards body or the issuance of waivers, warning that it could cause antitrust issues if not.
Some legal experts agree that an industry-wide coordinated could amount to “output restriction,” which violates antitrust law, specifically the Sherman Act. Some Congress members seem worried about this too. In July, Indiana Sen. Jim Banks and California Sen. Adam Schiff introduced the “Collaboration on Adversarial Threats and Security Risks Act,” which would give antitrust carveouts to AI labs that are meant to ease safety coordination.
Meanwhile, some AI startup executives, like Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez, are portraying the calls as a covert masking of an anti-competitive scheme in which the top “market-dominant” AI labs get “to define the rules and safety standards” of AI.
“Once again using fear under the pretext of protecting the public, these oligopolies are now requesting to bend competition rules and be permitted to dictate the terms for everyone else,” Gomez wrote in an essay. “A wolf in sheep’s clothing, a cartel by another name.”
The early remarks coming from Trump’s cabinet also suggest a trickier path forward for any waiver-assisted collaboration.
President Trump has long been strictly against increasing regulatory scrutiny of the AI industry, and he’s standing firm in that position. When asked about the antitrust concerns in an interview with Bloomberg, Trump’s attorney general Todd Blanche said that he would not want to prejudge whether the companies should be granted an antitrust exemption before consulting the rest of the Administration.
“We’re there to support and make sure that whatever policies the President wants to put into place, there’s a legal part of that,” Blanche told Bloomberg.
Also on Tuesday, Trump’s Federal Trade Commission chairman Andrew Ferguson said that he was “deeply suspicious” of the antitrust exemptions.
“I will say generally, though, that if companies are simultaneously coming to Washington and asking for a host of regulations and an antitrust exemption, all of my alarm bells go off,” Ferguson said at an event at Georgetown University, per Reuters. “They’re asking for barriers to entry that will insulate their incumbency from challenge. And I think if you combine that with the requested antitrust exemption, everyone should be deeply suspicious about this,” he added.
According to Lehane, such industry-wide coordination on safety already has precedent under existing antitrust law, like in the airline industry where companies are allowed to share sensitive information if related to safety coordination. The government, under the Obama administration, also clarified that companies can share information to defend against cybersecurity risks. That’s why some experts think the proposed AI safety coordination can fall under that guidance, arguing that there is no reason to amend existing antitrust law to grant exemptions.
Unlike Amodei, OpenAI executive Lehane told Bloomberg that he doesn’t anticipate needing an antitrust waiver.
Lehane’s remarks on Tuesday were delivered in a press briefing in Washington, where the OpenAI chief had come to meet with lawmakers. The AI giant is apparently backing two bipartisan bills. One of them is the FRONTIER Act, which would create a federal framework for AI safety and force only the top AI labs to allow audits by independent verification organizations. The bill has received some pushback from the House AI Commission. The second is a new proposal currently under development by Majority Leader John Thune, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, and Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar, which would reportedly give the Commerce Secretary power to deploy government auditors to test AI models.
Either way, despite the seeming urgency of the issue, it’s not even certain if an AI bill could pass by the end of the year, according to Thune.
“There are going to continue to be a lot of conversations about potential paths forward, but getting anything done in the near term is going to be challenging given the other stuff we’re dealing with,” Thune told reporters on Tuesday, per Politico.