Mark Zuckerberg · Anthropic · Wired
Antitrust experts say that while the companies’ charged language isn’t necessarily doing them any favors
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Under antitrust law, how a company’s employees talk about business decisions is often as important as the business decisions themselves.
Key facts
- 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
- 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
- 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
- David Lawrence, until recently a policy director of the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division, wrote on LinkedIn that agreements that prevent catastrophic risks “increase output and promote
Summary
Following multiple reports of AI agent swarms hacking websites and coordinating via secret message boards, along with a dire message for humanity from an outgoing Anthropic engineer, leading AI companies have called for a coordinated AI development “slowdown.” 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.
“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.