OpenAI is asking Congress whether coordinating an AI slowdown with rivals would actually be legal

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OpenAI has approached members of Congress in recent weeks to determine whether orchestrating an industry wide pause in frontier AI development, in coordination with rivals like Anthropic and Google, would run afoul of federal antitrust law, according to reporting from WIRED citing people close to the company. The concern centers on the Sherman Antitrust Act, since multiple companies jointly agreeing to restrict their own output, in this case the pace and scope of AI capability development, is a fundamentally different legal situation than any single company independently deciding to slow down its own work on its own timeline.

The inquiry follows a September 6 blog post from OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki, who argued the AI research community should seriously consider coordinating to reduce development speed while labs collectively work out shared safety standards, and that he expected voluntary slowdowns to become increasingly common practice until some kind of general safety baseline gets established across the industry. Notably, OpenAI has not actually announced any pause of its own, it is specifically trying to understand the legal risk before any joint action with competitors would actually occur.

The legal question is not merely hypothetical either. Nicholas Felstead, assistant director of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and a former AI policy fellow at the Center for Law and AI Risk, previously argued that a coordinated development pause could genuinely conflict with the Sherman Act, since the outcome would depend heavily on the precise details of any specific agreement. Felstead's broader point is that even if most safety focused collaborations would likely survive antitrust scrutiny if actually challenged in court, the legal uncertainty itself already functions as a powerful deterrent discouraging companies from attempting this kind of coordination at all.

A bipartisan bill, S.5105, already attempts to carve out a narrow antitrust safe harbor specifically for this exact situation, explicitly permitting companies to delay or limit publishing, deployment, development, training, testing, or evaluation of AI systems when the coordination targets specific defined catastrophic risk categories, chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons, offensive cyber capabilities, loss of control over critical infrastructure, or an inability to contain a runaway system. Price fixing, market sharing, and monopolization remain explicitly excluded from that carve out though, and companies would still need to notify the Department of Justice in writing before actually implementing any coordinated action under the proposed exemption

OpenAI Says AI Safety Coordination Could Collide With Antitrust Lawwww.techrepublic.com