FTC chair and Republican senators push back on antitrust waiver for AI labs

The idea gained attention after Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei published an essay days earlier proposing that frontier labs agree on common safety standards and limits on the pace of capability gains. He wrote that the U.S. government would need to issue a narrow antitrust waiver covering certain safety conversations.

At Georgetown University, Ferguson did not name Anthropic and said he was giving a personal view, Reuters reported. He described simultaneous requests for regulation and antitrust relief as incumbents seeking barriers to entry, and said President Donald Trump would set federal AI policy. Politico reported that Cruz, the Senate Commerce chair, derided the proposal at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, while Hawley said he would never consent to exemptions for a few of the largest companies.

Reuters, citing Bloomberg, reported that OpenAI's Chris Lehane said his company already works with Anthropic and Google on safety and sees no need for a waiver. Antitrust specialists told Reuters that existing doctrine permits coordination to prevent catastrophic harm, and Cohere co-founder Aidan Gomez warned against letting a few firms with shared commercial interests write the rules.