Huang rejects the antitrust waiver Amodei says a frontier slowdown would require

The waiver is the only part of the plan that needs someone outside the labs to say yes. Embedding third-party safety evaluators at each lab, the first step, is something a lab can do on its own ^[5]. The third step, "limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress," is an agreement between rivals about competing products ^[5]. The Sherman Antitrust Act generally prohibits agreements among rivals that unreasonably restrain competition, and agreements to restrict output sit among the forms of coordination that can be illegal outright ^[7]. Amodei wrote that "Some forms of coordination that would be impactful for pacing are legally challenging, and will require government support" ^[6].

Huang answered three days later ^[20]. His argument was that the statute book is already full: "We have plenty of laws. We have plenty of regulations that govern the reliability and the functionality of products," he said on "Mad Money" ^[10][2]. He agreed AI companies need to take safety seriously and said they are able to solve those problems themselves ^[19]. "Safety is an engineering problem. Testing is an engineering problem," he said ^[11]. He also pushed back on existential warnings: "We're not going to die in 2030" ^[18].

Now take the proposal from the seller's side. An agreement to ship fewer models later is, in demand terms, an agreement among the buyers of Nvidia's chips to defer purchases, and Anthropic and OpenAI are both important Nvidia customers ^[13]. The AI boom has made Nvidia the world's largest chipmaker and most valuable company ^[15]. Self-interest is the easy reading of Huang's answer and probably the correct one as far as it goes; the more interesting version is Nemotron. Nvidia develops its own family of open-weight models ^[14], so a rate limit written for model developers would reach the supplier alongside its customers ^[21].

Two ways that reading looks wrong. Huang's own position gets to Amodei's outcome without a statute if each lab holds releases on its own judgement: "if they're not ready to be released, just hold on to it and keep testing it and keep engineering until it's ready," he said ^[12]. Pacing could also migrate into evaluator access and standards work, where the first step already lives ^[5], and the antitrust question would never be tested. I would still expect no coordinated slowdown to be agreed while the company selling the hardware opposes the exemption that would make one lawful ^[1]. Huang told Cramer that "companies should innovate as fast as possible, but they should never innovate so fast as to release unsafe products" ^[22].