Dirk Auer Cited in Forkast on AI Pacing and Antitrust
Forkast cited ICLE Director of Competition Policy Dirk Auer’s analysis in an article on Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s proposal to pace frontier AI development. The piece examines whether embedded evaluators could impose costs that favor larger labs and whether coordinated development under an antitrust waiver could limit competition. Read the full piece here.
The most contentious element of this plan is the call for a democratic coordination mechanism, which explicitly requires a US government antitrust waiver. Critics, including Dirk Auer of Truth on the Market, have labeled this a “crisis cartel.” The tension here is fundamental: antitrust law exists to prevent the very collusion that Amodei argues is necessary for safety. The request for a narrow waiver creates a direct conflict with competition law, as it asks regulators to sanction private discussions that could easily devolve into market-sharing agreements. As Auer notes, while enforcers can easily observe if a company delays a training run, they cannot readily verify if that time was actually spent on interpretability or simply used to solidify a competitive advantage.