FTC chair says AI firms' regulation push plus antitrust exemption ask raises red flags

The waiver Dario Amodei asked for would cover conversation. He wrote that the U.S. government would "need to issue a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations" ^[8]. Antitrust experts and some smaller competitors said the doctrines already on the books would let rivals coordinate against catastrophic risk without one ^[10].

Ferguson answered four days later ^[16], and he answered as an individual. He said he was giving his personal opinion, and he did not name Anthropic ^[2]. "I will say generally, though, that 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," he said at an event at Georgetown University in Washington ^[4][3]. He said President Donald Trump would set AI policy for the federal government ^[3]. Reuters reported the remarks as the first public indication of how the Trump administration views Anthropic's bid ^[15].

Cohere's objection was about authorship. "If this is the most consequential technology in human history, then the rules for it cannot be written by a small group of commercially aligned companies behind an antitrust waiver," co-founder Aidan Gomez wrote ^[13].

Part of the pressure behind the request is internal to 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" ^[14].

Against the waiver sits one commissioner's personal view, which is the only federal comment on the record so far ^[15]. No exemption has been granted, and until one is, the release calendar belongs to whichever lab ships first.