Former DOJ Antitrust Chief: AI Companies Don't Need Exemptions

Former antitrust enforcer rejects AI industry's call for coordination

AI companies don't need antitrust exemptions to build safe products, according to Jonathan Kanter, who led the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division during the Biden administration. In a recent interview, Kanter dismissed arguments from OpenAI, Anthropic, and other frontier AI labs that they need permission to coordinate on safety measures.

"These companies do not need to coordinate in order to deliver safe and secure products to society," Kanter told The Verge's Nilay Patel. He compared the situation to Boeing addressing safety issues without needing to slow down innovation with Airbus, or car manufacturers fixing defects without industry-wide coordination.

Kanter, now a professor at Washington University and Carnegie Mellon, brought major antitrust cases against Google, Apple, and Ticketmaster during his tenure. He sees the current AI regulation debate as falling somewhere between genuine safety concerns and strategic maneuvering ahead of IPOs.

Two interpretations of industry motives

Kanter outlined what he called the "most generous" and "most cynical" readings of AI companies' push for regulation — neither of which, he emphasized, justify antitrust exemptions.

The generous interpretation: Companies genuinely fear their technology could cause catastrophic harm and want government guardrails. "I believe they believe it could destroy humanity," Kanter said, though he questioned whether such doomsday scenarios are accurate.

The cynical view: Companies are "hemorrhaging cash" and want regulatory cover to slow spending without damaging their valuations before going public. "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," he explained.

Product liability, not coordination

Kanter argued that existing legal frameworks already hold companies responsible for harm caused by their products or agents — whether human employees or AI systems. If an AI agent hacks into another system, the company that created it should face liability, just as it would if an employee committed the same act.

"Companies have an obligation today to build safe and secure products and the pace of innovation isn't an excuse not to go do that," he said.

He acknowledged that some forms of collaboration are legitimate and don't require antitrust exemptions, such as sharing threat intelligence through clearinghouses. But agreements to slow competitive development cross a line. "If two companies say, 'We're competing too hard and we need to slow down,' yes, that could implicate the antitrust laws, but that's not what we should be doing here."

Why it matters

The debate over AI regulation has created unusual political alignments, with former Trump AI czar David Sacks echoing similar skepticism about antitrust exemptions. As AI companies face mounting pressure from researchers who have quit over safety concerns, the question of whether they need regulatory coordination or simply better product development has significant implications for competition, innovation speed, and market concentration in the AI industry.

Kanter drew parallels to social media regulation, noting it took a decade for product liability cases to force Meta to address harm to teenagers. He argued the current moment — before AI systems are deeply embedded in society — is the time for Congress to clarify liability rules, though he expressed pessimism about congressional action given lobbying pressure and political dysfunction.

The details were first reported by The Verge in an interview conducted by editor-in-chief Nilay Patel.