The AI ‘Slowdown’ Is an Antitrust Mess

What happened

” Alongside various versions of this specific phrase—slowdown—they’ve also expressed concerns that doing so would run afoul of antitrust laws. Antitrust experts say that while the companies’ charged language isn’t necessarily doing them any favors, the unrestrained development of a rogue killer AI probably isn’t in line with the spirit of the Sherman Act, a key US antitrust law that exists to promote a competitive marketplace.

Zuckerberg instead argued that AI labs have a “strong natural incentive” to make AI agents behave better because consumers don’t want models doing things people don’t intend—known as “misalignment” in AI industry jargon—and that the companies that don’t take the time to get alignment right “will fall behind” competitively.

” If anything, collectively agreeing not to implement safety measures could expose the AI labs to allegations of “quality fixing,” says Roger Alford, a professor at Notre Dame Law School and the former second-in-command for the DOJ Antitrust Division.

That’s when companies mutually agree not to improve their own products; Alford points to a European antitrust case in which car companies worked together to develop emissions-reducing technology but agreed to not compete on improvements beyond what the law required. They ultimately had to pay roughly the equivalent of a billion-dollar fine. And of course, self-regulation isn’t new.

Bergmayer points out that industries can already limit their antitrust liability via the National Cooperative Research and Production Act of 1993, which lets them stand up a standards-development organization so long as they file a notification to the FTC and the DOJ. Trustbusters are typically skeptical of antitrust exemptions, because they say they end up making big players even bigger and preventing newer companies from getting traction in a market.

Why it matters

At the same time, getting an official all-clear from the government to move forward could ward off costly investigations down the line. Under antitrust law, how a company’s employees talk about business decisions is often as important as the business decisions themselves.

Google famously trained its employees not to use certain phrases—even internally—that could imply it was engaging in anticompetitive behavior, and instead instructed them to emphasize the ways that business decisions would improve its offerings and benefit consumers.

So from an antitrust perspective, the use of phrases like “a slowdown” or “a pause” may set off more alarms than the actual activity it represents: developing ways to ensure that advanced AI models don’t go rogue. A collectively agreed-upon slowdown without any particular purpose could be interpreted by regulators as an anticompetitive agreement to reduce trade.

“I think they kind of boxed themselves into a corner with the way they phrase things,” says John Bergmayer, legal counsel for the nonprofit Public Knowledge.

” Rather than talk about some collusive-sounding effort to dial back development, he says, AI companies could have just emphasized their desire to work on safety protocols together to prevent catastrophic risks and treated a slowdown in model releases as a natural side-effect of that.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose company recently dodged a massive antitrust suit brought by the Federal Trade Commission, chimed in on the slowdown proposal by not endorsing an explicit “slowdown” at all.

What to watch

Others have raised eyebrows at the request as well, including David Sacks, the cochair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science & Technology. ” But many employees of major AI companies have earnestly voiced concerns about how quickly their workplaces are churning out new models, potentially at the cost of safety. “Sometimes companies want to be regulated as a ploy to pull up the ladder behind them.

But sometimes it really is that they feel like the market is pressuring them to act in a way that they think they shouldn't,” says Bergmayer.