Does AI need an antitrust exemption so it doesn’t kill everyone????
Decoder podcast: former DOJ antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter argues against AI antitrust exemptions and questions frontier labs' safety coordination motives.
The Verge's Decoder podcast interviews Jonathan Kanter, former head of the DOJ Antitrust Division, about whether frontier AI labs such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind should receive antitrust exemptions to coordinate on safety. Kanter argues no exemption is warranted, citing both a generous interpretation (fear of unregulated risk) and a cynical one (regulatory capture, cartel formation, and IPO valuation protection). He references his antitrust cases against Google, Apple, and Ticketmaster with Lina Khan, and discusses how regulation interacts with competition policy and China.
- Kanter says frontier labs' coordinated safety appeals should not earn an antitrust exemption under any interpretation.
- Labs discussed include OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind, citing Dario Amodei's 'pace the frontier' framing.
- He suspects labs want permission to slow spending, protect IPO valuations, and foreclose open-weight Chinese competitors.
- Kanter won antitrust cases against Google and Ticketmaster; the Apple case continues under the Trump DOJ.
- Organizations
- Department of Justice
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- United StatesChina
From the original article
15 min read at theverge.com
Today on Decoder, we’ve got the first of a two-part series on the future of business, and I’m talking with Jonathan Kanter, the former antitrust chief for the US Department of Justice in the Biden administration. These days, he’s both a professor of law at WashU and professor of technology policy at Carnegie Mellon. The biggest story in tech right now is the spiraling debate about AI safety and regulation.
By Nilay Patel · theverge.com
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