US FTC chair suspicious of calls for AI antitrust exemptions

On Tuesday, the head of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission expressed deep suspicion about artificial intelligence companies seeking antitrust exemptions while simultaneously advocating for new regulations. FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson made this statement during an event at Georgetown University in Washington, emphasizing that his comments were his personal opinion and did not refer to any specific company.

The chairman's remarks come amid growing public alarm about the potential dangers posed by AI, particularly after an Anthropic researcher resigned, citing concerns that AI could pose a threat to humanity by the end of the decade. Ferguson's comments provide the first public indication of how the Trump administration views Anthropic's request for an antitrust exemption, which would allow the company to collaborate on mitigating the risks associated with AI development.

Ferguson warned that companies simultaneously requesting regulations and an antitrust exemption may be seeking barriers to entry that would protect their incumbency from competition. He suggested that anyone should be cautious about such requests, as they could result in an insulating effect against rival firms. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had previously called for a deliberate slowdown in AI development and for an exemption to usual restrictions on competitors working together on safety measures.

Antitrust experts and some smaller competitors criticized the proposal, arguing that legal doctrines already exist to permit coordination among companies to prevent catastrophic risks. They pointed to a past statement by U.S. antitrust authorities indicating that information sharing among companies on cybersecurity is permissible under antitrust law.

In a blog post, Cohere co-founder Aidan Gomez described the proposal as part of a pattern of Silicon Valley incumbents shaping the regulatory landscape surrounding AI. He emphasized that if AI is the most consequential technology in human history, its rules cannot be set by a small group of commercially aligned companies behind an antitrust waiver.