AI’s coming roadblock in regulation: Antitrust hawks

The push to regulate artificial intelligence faces a big speed bump in Washington: Antitrust hawks.

AI companies have asked for narrow antitrust exemptions to collaborate on safety issues as they push Washington to regulate them amid growing fears that the technology could grow out of control. But some lawmakers on Capitol Hill who would write the laws regulating the industry are recoiling at the suggestion of an antitrust carveout.

“No,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., told CNBC at the Capitol when asked about a potential waiver. “Antitrust law already has an exception for companies working together on safety issues; there’s no need for any additional antitrust waivers.”

“I understand that big companies love antitrust waivers, but no,” she said.

Warren was one of a number of antitrust exemption skeptics on Capitol Hill who CNBC spoke with to gauge the appetite for granting the request floated by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei with support from other AI executives.

In a blog post earlier this month, Amodei raised the possibility of an antitrust waiver. The essay, titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” came after one of Anthropic’s researchers resigned and said publicly that AI “could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

“AI companies can and should voluntarily work together to set standards,” Amodei wrote in the essay. “For antitrust reasons, it’s helpful for the US government to mediate or at least enable these discussions — they don’t need to participate, but do need to issue a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations.”

Other AI executives quickly endorsed Amodei’s call to action, setting off a mad dash in Washington to come up with rules for the technology.

But the short amount of time left this year for Congress to legislate and the bitterly divided nature of the government’s legislative branch mean that any brewing dissent presents a risk to quickly passing legislation on a pivotal topic like AI.

Antitrust enforcers are also skeptical of any carveouts for AI, whose executives met Tuesday at the White House with President Donald Trump.

In addition to Amodei Google‘s Sundar Pichai, Tesla and SpaceX chief Elon Musk, Meta‘s Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI President Greg Brockman and Jensen Huang of Nvidia appeared at the White House as Trump declared that artificial intelligence should be called “super intelligence” instead.

Jonathan Kanter, who ran the Justice Department’s antitrust division under former President Joe Biden, told CNBC an exemption to existing antitrust laws is not needed for the companies to collaborate on safety.

“They can share information about malicious threats and other information without an antitrust exemption,” Kanter said. “The antitrust laws don’t prevent companies from coming together to talk about how to develop…