Tap Your Own Brakes: AI Safety and Antitrust
Frontier artificial-intelligence (AI) labs may have good reasons to tap the brakes. The antitrust question begins when they all reach for the same pedal.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s proposal to “pace the frontier” has become a rallying point for AI companies interested in coordinating a slowdown in capability development. His plan calls for embedded outside evaluators, common safety standards, and limits on the pace of model advances. Amodei also suggests that some form of antitrust waiver may be needed to permit certain safety discussions.
As my colleague Dirk Auer explains, agreements among rivals to restrain development deserve scrutiny, even when made in the name of safety. Before granting an exemption, policymakers should ask where existing legal and market incentives—and the forms of cooperation antitrust law already allows—fall short.
Civil and criminal laws already give AI labs reason to consider the consequences of their conduct, including safety risks. Market incentives point in the same direction. Customers favor products that work as intended and remain dependable. A model that enables mass hacking or causes other serious harm is, among other things, a very bad product.
Companies can respond to these incentives on their own by strengthening safeguards, limiting model autonomy, or delaying releases. Existing antitrust law also permits competitors to collaborate on many safety matters and participate in carefully structured standard-setting efforts.
Any proposed exemption therefore carries a heavy burden. Its proponents must show why unilateral action and lawful collaboration cannot address the problem—and identify precisely what conduct existing antitrust law prevents.