Washington balks at giving AI firms waiver to create safety standard

Andrew Ferguson, chair of the Federal Trade Commission, went to Georgetown University — presumably because the buffet is decent — and said the quiet part at a comfortable volume: "if companies are simultaneously coming to Washington and asking for a host of regulations and an antitrust exemption, all of my alarm bells go off." Fair play to the man; that is a sentence with actual verbs in it. The FTC chair noting that a request for both the rulebook and the permission slip is a bit of a cheek is the closest American regulation has come to self-awareness this quarter.

The request in question comes from Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei, who wrote that AI companies "can and should voluntarily work together to set standards", and that Washington should grant a "narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations". Voluntarily working together on standards is, of course, the thing antitrust law was invented to prevent, which is why the word "voluntarily" is doing the heavy lifting of a man explaining that the cartel is for the public good, actually. Nobody is proposing anything untoward; they would just like a legally sanctioned room in which the leading labs may agree on what "safe" means and who gets to sell it.

Senator Ted Cruz also pushed back, which should tell you something about how the pitch is landing — when Ted Cruz and the FTC chair find themselves on the same side of a competition argument, the water has gone strange. The industry's preference is regulation it drafts, enforcement it shapes, and liability it avoids, and the tell is that a "narrow waiver" is narrow the way a keyhole is narrow. Somewhere a lobbyist is already redrafting "narrow" to mean "narrow for now." Ferguson's alarm bells are, notably, the only piece of safety infrastructure in this story anyone has confirmed is operational.