Following multiple reports of AI agent swarms hacking websites and coordinating via secret message boards, along with a dire message for humanity from an outgoing Anthropic engineer, leading AI companies have called for a coordinated AI development “slowdown.” Alongside various versions of this specific phrase—slowdown—they’ve also expressed concerns that doing so would run afoul of antitrust laws.
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, a key US antitrust law that exists to promote a competitive marketplace. At the same time, getting an official all-clear from the government to move forward could ward off costly investigations down the line.
Radical Rhetoric
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.
So from an antitrust perspective, the use of phrases like “a slowdown” or “a pause” may set off more alarms than the actual activity it represents: developing ways to ensure that advanced AI models don’t go rogue. A collectively agreed-upon slowdown without any particular purpose could be interpreted by regulators as an anticompetitive agreement to reduce trade.
“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,” says Bergmayer, which is to say, whether two or more companies are making a pact to “kind of take it easy.” Rather than talk about some collusive-sounding effort to dial back development, he says, AI companies could have just emphasized their desire to work on safety protocols together to prevent catastrophic risks and treated a slowdown in model releases as a natural side-effect of that.
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—known as “misalignment” in AI industry jargon—and that the companies that don’t take the time to get alignment right “will fall behind” competitively. It’s the difference between two automakers saying “we’ve agreed to not make better cars for a while” and saying “we’re not making faster cars until we figure out how to make them safe, because no one will buy our cars if they kill people.”
(Disclosure: The reporter on this story previously worked at the FTC but did not participate in the Meta case.)
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.”
“After all,” a career FTC antitrust attorney commented below the post, “no humanity would result in no competition.”
If anything, collectively agreeing not to implement safety measures could expose the AI labs to allegations of “quality fixing,” says Roger Alford, a professor at Notre Dame Law School and the former second-in-command for the DOJ Antitrust Division. That’s when companies mutually agree not to improve their own products; Alford points to a European antitrust case in which car companies worked together to develop emissions-reducing technology but agreed to not compete on improvements beyond what the law required. They ultimately had to pay roughly the equivalent of a billion-dollar fine.
And of course, self-regulation isn’t new. Bergmayer points out that industries can already limit their antitrust liability via the National Cooperative Research and Production Act of 1993, which lets them stand up a standards-development organization so long as they file a notification to the FTC and the DOJ.
Market Pressures
Trustbusters are typically skeptical of antitrust exemptions, because they say they end up making big players even bigger and preventing newer companies from getting traction in a market. Others have raised eyebrows at the request as well, including David Sacks, the cochair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science & Technology. Sacks accused Anthropic and OpenAI of being a duopoly and said the antitrust exemption request was an “election-season psyop” and an excuse to “form a cartel.”
But many employees of major AI companies have earnestly voiced concerns about how quickly their workplaces are churning out new models, potentially at the cost of safety.
“Sometimes companies want to be regulated as a ploy to pull up the ladder behind them. But sometimes it really is that they feel like the market is pressuring them to act in a way that they think they shouldn’t,” says Bergmayer. “Psychologically, maybe the AI labs feel like they don’t have the permission of the markets or their upcoming IPO or something to unilaterally take action like that.”
This summer, both Anthropic and OpenAI filed confidential paperwork for initial public offerings and have valuations near or beyond a trillion dollars each. Anthropic is expected to go public next month, while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company would delay its IPO until 2027 because of the recent safety concerns. (OpenAI’s CFO previously told employees that it would be a public company in 2027, according to CNBC.) The Ramp AI Index, which measures AI adoption rates, suggests that the two companies’ models have similar usage rates and are competing neck and neck for the top spot. Neither company responded to a request for comment for this story.
“They, I think, want an exemption because, in their mind, somehow they think they need to coordinate on a slowdown because, let’s be honest, they don’t want to unilaterally disarm while the others keep going at a breakneck speed,” says Alford.
There’s political pressure to keep moving as fast as possible too. After news about the slowdown proposal, President Donald Trump posted on social media that the government already has “tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies!” and that “WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS!”
The Department of Defense’s chief technology officer account has also been posting “anti-doomer” memes, seemingly in response to the idea of a slowdown.
The DOJ Antitrust Division also isn’t immune to political machinations. Alford was ousted from the agency last year after accusing DOJ leadership of corruption because they approved a merger between two technology infrastructure companies that Alford later described as a “scandal” in a public speech. And a Wall Street Journal journalist reported that Andrew Ferguson, the chair of the FTC, told attendees at an antitrust conference that Trump would “ultimately decide any AI policy.”
If the federal government were to initiate an antitrust investigation into an AI slowdown, it would be considered a “conduct investigation.” Unlike a “merger investigation,” which imposes strict time limits on a government probe, a conduct investigation can take years. AI companies could be required to produce millions of pages of documents, executives and other key employees could be dragged into depositions, and hundreds of other employees could have their devices subject to litigation holds—even if the government ultimately decides it doesn’t have a case.
With no new regulations in sight and likely no antitrust exemption to come, frontier AI labs will have to write the rules of the road themselves, and potentially dodge an investigation or two along the way.
