Does AI need an antitrust exemption so it doesn't kill everyone????

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Nilay Patel (0:22)

Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. This is part one of a two-part series we're doing on the future of business. The biggest story in tech right now is the spiraling debate about AI safety and regulation. Researchers at the big AI labs, including Anthropic and Google DeepMind, have recently quit in noisy ways, saying the models those companies are developing pose real threats, and safety isn't being taken seriously across the industry. Other researchers have agreed, saying the chances of AI killing us all is greater than 10 percent, and the CEOs of all these companies have issued various calls to slow down development and develop regulation, including asking for antitrust exemptions so they can all coordinate on safety issues. That is a lot of ideas, and I've been especially curious about the ask for an antitrust exemption, which has led to accusations that these companies are seeking regulatory capture, attempting to form a cartel, and even somehow find a way out from investor pressure ahead of their IPOs. So, to make sense of it all, I called Jonathan Kanter, the former antitrust chief of the United States Department of Justice under the Biden Administration. These days, he is both a professor of law at WashU and a professor of technology policy at Carnegie Mellon. During his time as the DOJ's antitrust chief, Kanter brought huge cases against Google, Apple, and Ticketmaster, and along with Lina Khan, led what amounted to a full reboot of American antitrust policy. He won those cases against Google and Ticketmaster, and that case against Apple is still live in the Trump Administration, surprising many. That antitrust reboot has also led to some surprising alliances in the AI safety debate.

Vowed Libertarian and former Trump AI czar David Sacks has been approvingly retweeting Lina Khan, saying there's no need for an antitrust exemption. Again, this is a lot of ideas, and you're going to hear Jonathan and I really get into the weeds of how all this regulation might work, how it might interact with antitrust law, competition policy, and our relationship with China. Okay, Jonathan Kanter, former DOJ antitrust chief on AI safety and regulation. Here we go.

Jonathan Kanter, the former head of the DOJ antitrust division in Biden Administration and a current professor of law at WashU and professor of technology policy at Carnegie Mellon. Welcome back to Decoder.

Jonathan Kanter (2:27)

Always a pleasure to be back.

Nilay Patel (2:29)

This is great. You're a private citizen now. You don't have to give me the politician answer.

Jonathan Kanter (2:32)

I can say whatever I want. I feel so free.

Nilay Patel (2:34)

I'm very excited about this.

Jonathan Kanter (2:37)

I plan to as well.

Nilay Patel (2:38)

I have a million questions about the state of AI regulation in America right now. There is a swirl of ideas about how we should or should not regulate these companies.

There is the Trump Administration, whose posture seems to be no, which is fascinating.

You rarely see the federal government just decline to participate in the way that the Trump Administration appears to be declining to participate. And then there's an incredible backbone of antitrust concern floating throughout all of this. Are these companies trying to form a cartel? Are they aware that maybe their IPOs aren't going to go the way they want to, so they're seeking regulatory capture in some way that is good or bad? Are they trying to foreclose cheaper competition from open-weight Chinese models? Give me your sense of just the state of things right now, and then I want to dive into the specifics with you.

Jonathan Kanter (3:33)

So the state of the world right now is it's like we've invented cars and trucks, but we have no lines on the road, no traffic lights and no stop signs and no speed limits.

We've invented this incredibly powerful technology that's transforming how we live our lives, how we conduct business, how we socialize, how we seek and generate and consume information, and we need some basic rules of the road. I think about it in two fronts. What are the things that companies should be doing, and what are the things that government should be doing? I think there are responsibilities on both ends, and so happy to dive into both.

Nilay Patel (4:08)

Well, let's just start with the very notion that asking for regulation necessarily forms a cartel. All the big frontier AI companies, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepMind, even Elon Musk, these are companies that do not necessarily like each other. These are people that do not necessarily like each other, and they are saying in concert that they should slow down. The phrase that Dario Amadei from Anthropic is using is to pace the frontier. My read of this is that they simply do not trust each other, that they are in a prisoner's dilemma, and they need an outside force, most likely the government, to enforce some kind of policy framework on them that they have to agree with.