The AI ‘Slowdown’ Is an Antitrust Mess

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. At the same time, getting an official all-clear from the government to move forward could ward off costly investigations down the line.

Radical Rhetoric

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.

(Disclosure: The reporter on this story previously worked at the FTC but did not participate in the Meta case.)

“After all,” a career FTC antitrust attorney commented below the post, “no humanity would result in no competition.”