Trump DOJ official downplays antitrust concerns about companies coordinating AI safety development

A senior Justice Department official on Thursday sought to clarify emerging antitrust questions surrounding artificial intelligence companies’ calls to slow development of the technology, saying cooperation on cybersecurity does not appear anticompetitive.Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward said at Fordham University in New York that the DOJ is reviewing whether to update existing guidance on cybersecurity cooperation. But he stopped short of saying that firms merely coordinating to pace the safety and cybersecurity parameters of their products should require any DOJ oversight.“It doesn’t occur to me that coordinating on cybersecurity or security is anticompetitive,” Woodward, a former personal attorney to President Donald Trump and ranking DOJ official, said during the 53rd annual Conference on International Antitrust Law and Policy. Woodward added that the department’s Antitrust Division was open to meeting with companies, but that firms at the forefront of development in frontier AI labs had not requested a meeting about any antitrust concerns.The remarks offered some reassurance to companies seeking to cooperate on safety without explicitly endorsing a broader agreement among rivals to limit the pace of AI development. They also provided a more specific response after Attorney General Todd Blanche declined Tuesday to say whether such cooperation would require an antitrust waiver.“I can’t address that,” Blanche said when asked if the companies need a waiver to coordinate. “What I can say is that to the extent that those companies are looking to regulate themselves or fix problems that they have, they should do that, but working with us is unnecessary.”The debate comes after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon said last week that he had resigned, in part because the “people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” Coxon has since gone on dozens of news shows after his claims first surfaced in a Wall Street Journal report and viral post on X.Dario Amodei, CEO & co-founder of Anthropic, speaks at the convening of the International Network of AI Safety Institutes at the Golden Gate Club at the Presidio in San Francisco, Nov. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File) In response to Coxon’s claims, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called for antitrust permission to allow competing AI developers to coordinate a slower pace of advancement, arguing that safety measures need time to catch up with increasingly capable systems.The proposal has raised questions about how companies could work together to address shared risks while complying with laws intended to preserve competition.Existing federal guidance draws a distinction between sharing cybersecurity information and exchanging sensitive business information. In a 2014 joint policy statement, the DOJ and the Federal Trade Commission said legitimate exchanges about cyberthreats differ from sharing information about prices, output, or business plans that could raise antitrust concerns.President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has encouraged the industry to maintain its momentum rather than slow development, adding a political complication to companies’ efforts to coordinate a more cautious approach.The president’s chairman of the FTC, Andrew Ferguson, has also expressed similar skepticism about large AI companies seeking antitrust exemptions while supporting additional regulation.Some industry cooperation is already underway. OpenAI’s top lobbyist, Chris Lehane, said Wednesday that the company had been working with Anthropic and Google on AI safety for several weeks and did not believe those discussions required an antitrust waiver, Bloomberg reported this week.Woodward’s prepared speech focused primarily on the division of antitrust enforcement authority between Washington and the states. He defended the Trump administration’s enforcement priorities and argued that federal officials should lead reviews of mergers with national consequences while working with states on local effects.“When a merger harms local markets, we want the states in the room,” Woodward said, referencing the administration’s support of Paramount’s request for states challenging its merger with Warner Bros. to “post a bond” to ensure transaction opponents “cannot abuse the judicial process.”EX-TRUMP ADVISER BACKS SELF-IMPOSED AI SLOWDOWN, REJECTS ‘CARTEL’ FRAMEWORK“When it is national, we expect to lead — but we will work with our state colleagues to help us understand state and local impacts,” Woodward said.But Woodward’s cybersecurity comments left unresolved how far AI companies could go beyond exchanging security information to jointly determine the pace of technological development, and when that could cross the line into more specific anticompetitive practices.