OpenAI Presses Congress on Legality of AI Slowdown — SkimNews
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- OpenAI has asked Congress in recent weeks whether coordinating an industry-wide slowdown on frontier AI development would be legal, with substantive safety coordination potentially running afoul of antitrust law.
- Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI's chief scientist, published a blog post last weekend arguing the AI research world should 'coordinate to slow down future development,' predicting voluntary slowdowns will become commonplace until shared safety bars are established.
- Nicholas Felstead of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission argued in March that a coordinated AI pause could violate the Sherman Antitrust Act by restricting output, noting 'legal uncertainty can act as a powerful deterrent.'
- A bipartisan, bicameral group introduced the 'Collaboration on Adversarial Threats and Security Risks Act' in July to explicitly exempt AI safety coordination from antitrust statutes, though the House version has stalled in the Judiciary Committee.
- John Schulman, an OpenAI co-founder now at Thinking Machines, dismissed antitrust concerns as 'fake' on X, writing that antitrust 'prohibits certain agreements, but not from jointly developing a proposal,' and urging OpenAI and Anthropic to work on a pacing proposal together.
- Beyond legal risk, AI labs may resist coordination due to fierce market competition, shared Trump administration concerns about staying ahead of China on AI, and fundamental disagreements over what safe AI development looks like.
Why it matters: OpenAI's lobbying reveals that the AI industry's most talked-about safety mechanism — a coordinated slowdown — is stuck behind an unresolved legal question. With the House bill languishing in committee and enactment unlikely before the midterm elections, labs that genuinely want to coordinate face a chilling effect, while companies hiding behind antitrust fears can use legal uncertainty as a convenient shield to avoid collaboration they were never willing to do.
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