Leading AI companies are calling for a coordinated slowdown in AI development to address safety concerns, but antitrust experts warn such moves could trigger regulatory scrutiny. Anthropic and OpenAI have filed for exemptions under the Sherman Act, which aims to promote a competitive marketplace.

Antitrust experts say that while the companies’ charged language isn’t necessarily doing them any favors, the unrestrained development of a rogue killer AI probably isn’t in line with the spirit of the Sherman Act. Getting an official all-clear from the government to move forward could ward off costly investigations down the line.

Under antitrust law, how a company’s employees talk about business decisions is often as important as the business decisions themselves. Google famously trained its employees not to use certain phrases—even internally—that could imply it was engaging in anticompetitive behavior, and instead instructed them to emphasize the ways that business decisions would improve its offerings and benefit consumers.

“I think they kind of boxed themselves into a corner with the way they phrase things,” says John Bergmayer, legal counsel for the nonprofit Public Knowledge.

Usually in antitrust, one of the things that the economists look at is whether you're reducing output, which is to say, whether two or more companies are making a pact to “kind of take it easy.”

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose company recently dodged a massive antitrust suit brought by the Federal Trade Commission, chimed in on the slowdown proposal by not endorsing an explicit “slowdown” at all. Zuckerberg instead argued that AI labs have a “strong natural incentive” to make AI agents behave better because consumers don’t want models doing things people don’t intend.

David Lawrence, until recently a policy director of the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division, wrote on LinkedIn that agreements that prevent catastrophic risks actually “increase output and promote competition” and are already protected under the law by something called the “ancillary restraints doctrine.”

Source: wired