Jonathan Kanter, the former head of the US Department of Justice Antitrust Division during the Biden administration, is pushing back on the idea that frontier AI companies need an antitrust exemption to coordinate on safety. Kanter now teaches law at WashU and technology policy at Carnegie Mellon. He made the argument on Decoder, the podcast hosted by The Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel, in the first of a two-part series on the future of business.
The debate has intensified as researchers at major AI labs, including Anthropic and Google DeepMind, have left their positions and warned that the models present real dangers. Some researchers have put the odds of AI causing human extinction at more than 10 percent. The CEOs of those companies have called for slower development and new regulation, and some have asked for antitrust exemptions so they can coordinate on safety issues.
Kanter laid out two readings of that request. The charitable one, he said, is that companies fear the pace of innovation and want government to set basic rules, and he believes they genuinely fear a doomsday scenario. The more cynical reading, he said, is that they are spending heavily and want permission to slow down without damaging their valuations ahead of IPOs. He said neither reading justifies an antitrust exemption.
Kanter rejected the premise that companies must coordinate to ship safe products. He compared the situation to Boeing and Airbus, noting that Boeing did not need Airbus to slow down to fix its own aircraft problems, and said firms are responsible for the actions of their agents whether those agents are human or AI. He argued companies should face liability when their systems cause harm, and noted that existing antitrust law already allows legitimate safety collaboration, such as sharing information about threats and malicious bots.
The antitrust piece has drawn accusations that the companies are seeking regulatory capture, trying to form a cartel, or looking for an escape from investor pressure. Kanter brought major antitrust cases against Google, Apple, and Ticketmaster while in office and won the Google and Ticketmaster cases; the Apple case is still active under the Trump DOJ. The Trump administration’s posture on AI regulation has been to decline to participate, which Kanter described as unusual for the federal government.
The discussion also touched on China. One question raised in the debate is whether AI companies are trying to foreclose cheaper competition from open-weight Chinese models. Kanter’s warning about the risk of cartel-like arrangements in AI comes as the policy fight continues to draw attention, including from former Trump AI czar David Sacks, who has approvingly retweeted Lina Khan’s statement that no antitrust exemption is needed.
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