OpenAI asks Congress if AI industry slowdown is legal

OpenAI has asked members of Congress in recent weeks whether orchestrating an industry-wide slowdown on frontier AI development would be legal under antitrust law, according to Wired. Two of the researchers we track in our Who's Who directory circulated the story the day it ran.

The outreach follows a blog post last weekend by OpenAI's chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, arguing that the best path forward for AI research includes "coordinating to slow down future development," which he thinks will be key to keeping self-improving AI systems safe. Pachocki expects "voluntary slowdowns to become commonplace until shared safety bars are established."

The problem is the Sherman Act. Nicholas Felstead, assistant director of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and a former AI policy fellow at the Center for Law & AI Risk, wrote in March that a coordinated pause "may amount to companies restricting output, potentially violating the Sherman Antitrust Act," with the outcome depending "entirely on the precise details of any agreement."

Congress has one relevant bill on the table. In July, a bipartisan, bicameral group introduced the Collaboration on Adversarial Threats and Security Risks Act, led by Sens. Jim Banks and Adam Schiff and Reps. Bob Latta and George Whitesides. It would create a narrow antitrust safe harbor letting AI firms share threat information and coordinate defensive measures against national-security risks, and was pitched primarily as a counter to distillation threats from China rather than as cover for a general capability pause.