US FTC chair suspicious of calls for AI antitrust exemptions

US lawmakers are calling for greater oversight of artificial intelligence amid warnings from AI safety researchers about the technology’s potential risks. (Image: Reuters)

The chairman of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission said on Tuesday that “everyone should be deeply suspicious” about AI companies seeking antitrust exemptions while they also lobby for new regulations.

FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson said he was expressing his personal opinion, and did not directly name Anthropic, whose CEO last week called for antitrust permission to enable rivals to coordinate a ⁠slower pace ​to AI development due to safety concerns.

Public alarm about the potential danger posed by artificial intelligence is growing, after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon said last week he had resigned, in part because the “people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

Ferguson’s comments are the first public indication of how the Trump administration ​views ​Anthropic’s bid for an antitrust exemption to collaborate on mitigating that risk, ⁠and highlight how AI regulation is sometimes perceived as a tool large tech companies use to hamstring rivals.

Ferguson made the comments at an event at Georgetown University in Washington. ‌He said President Donald Trump would set AI policy for the federal government.

“I will say generally, though, that if companies are simultaneously coming to Washington and asking for a host of regulations and an antitrust exemption, all of my alarm bells go off,” he said.

“They’re asking for barriers to entry that will insulate their incumbency from challenge. And I think if you combine that with the requested antitrust exemption, everyone should be deeply suspicious about this,” he added.

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OpenAI’s top lobbyist Chris Lehane said the company has been working with ⁠rivals Anthropic and Alphabet’s Google ⁠on AI safety for several weeks, and said he did not see the need for an antitrust waiver for the three companies to talk about safety, Bloomberg ⁠reported.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called ‌on Friday for an intentional slowdown of AI development, and for an exemption to usual ​prohibitions on competitors working together. AI agents could become capable of ‌shutting down the internet in as soon as six months, causing billions of dollars in damage, he said.

The U.S. government would “need to issue a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations,” ‌he wrote.

Antitrust experts and some ​smaller competitors ​criticized the proposal, saying ​there are already legal doctrines that would apply in this situation and allow for coordination on preventing catastrophic risk.

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Several experts pointed to a past statement by U.S. antitrust authorities ​saying that information sharing among companies on cybersecurity is allowed under antitrust ⁠law.

Some industry participants also criticized the plan. Aidan Gomez, co-founder of Canadian AI company Cohere, called it the “latest in a string of recent efforts by Silicon Valley incumbents to shape the regulatory landscape surrounding AI,” in a blog ‌post on Sunday.

Regulatory ⁠debate on AI has been rife with accusations of companies supporting regulation that would trip up their competitors.

“If this is the most consequential technology in human history, then the ​rules for it cannot be written by a small group of commercially aligned companies behind an antitrust waiver,” Gomez wrote.