Does AI Need an Antitrust Exemption So It Doesn't Kill Everyone?

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 . Researchers at the big AI labs including Anthropic and Google DeepMind have quit in noisy ways, saying the models pose real threats and safety isn’t being taken seriously across the industry. Other researchers have said the chance 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 am especially curious about the antitrust piece, which has led to accusations that these companies are seeking regulatory capture, attempting to form a cartel, and even somehow finding a way out from investor pressure ahead of their IPOs.  Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here . Not a subscriber? You can sign up here . So to make sense of it all, I called Jonathan Kanter.  Jonathan brought huge antitrust cases against Google, Apple, and Ticketmaster during his time as antitrust chief, and along with Lina Khan, led what amounted to a full reboot of American antitrust policy. As you’ll hear him say, he won those cases against Google and Ticketmaster, and that case against Apple is still live in the Trump DOJ, surprising many.  That reboot has also led to some surprising alliances in the AI debate — avowed libertarian and former Trump AI czar David Sacks has been approvingly retweeting Lina Khan saying there’s no need for an antitrust exemption. This is all a lot, and you’ll hear Jonathan and me really get into the weeds of how all this regulation might work, and 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. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Jonathan Kanter, you’re the former head of the DOJ Antitrust Division in the Biden administration and a current professor of law at WashU and professor of technology policy at Carnegie Mellon. Welcome back to Decoder . Always a pleasure to be back. This is great. You’re a private citizen now. You don’t have to give me the politician answers. I can say whatever I want. I feel so free. I’m very excited about this. I plan to as well. 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’s 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. The state of the world right now is 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. We need some basic rules of the road. I think about it on two fronts. What are the things that companies should be doing? And what are things the government should be doing? There are responsibilities on both ends. I’m happy to dive into both. 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 — do not necessarily like each other. These are people that do not necessarily like each other. They are saying in concert that they should slow down. The phrase that Dario Amodei 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. Is that a fair read of just the basics here? Kind of. Let me give you my interpretation from the most generous to the most cynical, neither of which, TL;DR, should result in any sort of antitrust exemption.  The most generous interpretation is that they’re afraid of the pace of innovation and the lack of regulation means they don’t see any lines on the road. They don’t know where to drive and they’re worried about driving off the road or hitting somebody else. They’re begging for the government to step in and do something. Probably there’s a modicum of truth to that. I believe they believe it could destroy humanity. I’m not sure that that doomsday scenario is accurate, but I believe they believe that. That’s the more generous version. The more cynical version is that they’re spending so much money, they’re hemorrhaging cash and they can’t keep this up, but if they pull back, it’s going to affect their valuation as part of the IPO. So they would like somebody to give them all permission to stop spending so much money and slow the pace of innovation so that they don’t have to compete as hard so they can figure out their economics before they go public. Does an agreement among all the top players in a field like this automatically form a cartel? On that cynical side of the interpretation, there’s a lot of, “You just want regulatory capture. You want to make a cartel. You want to foreclose competition.” That is a risk certainly of that kind of arrangement. Let’s walk through what’s necessary and what’s not. Let me just be very clear, these companies do not need to coordinate in order to deliver safe and secure products to society. Think about this: imagine Boeing and Airbus. Boeing fears doors falling off the plane. It wasn’t Airbus’s fault and they didn’t need to slow down innovation with Airbus in order to prevent those doors from flying off the plane. They needed to figure out how to build planes that were safer. If you build cars that explode while you’re driving, it’s not the other car company’s fault and you don’t need to come together and figure out how to solve those problems. You need to figure out what went wrong in your manufacturing process. If you create products that create AI agents that break into somebody else’s and hack somebody else’s technology, it is no different, in my mind, than having an employee go do that. You have a responsibility to build safe and secure products and companies should be held liable when their agents, whether those agents are digital and binary or whether those agents are AI or whether those agents are humans. If they start doing bad things, the company that employs them can and should be held responsible. Those are the basic rules of the road. There are areas where there is legitimate collaboration in the context of safety and sec