DOJ antitrust official says AI safety coordination does not appear anticompetitive
AI safety debate intensifies
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei last week called for antitrust permission to enable rivals to coordinate a slower pace to AI development due to safety concerns.
Public alarm about the potential danger posed by artificial intelligence is growing, after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon said last week he had resigned, in part because the "people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade."
Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson said on Wednesday that he was suspicious of calls for antitrust exemptions by large companies also supporting regulation.
OpenAI's top lobbyist Chris Lehane said on Wednesday the company has been working with rivals Anthropic and Alphabet's GOOGL.O Google on AI safety for several weeks, and said he did not see the need for an antitrust waiver for the talks, Bloomberg reported.
European regulator urges cooperation
Europe's antitrust chief Teresa Ribera also spoke at the event, calling for coordination among regulators and between regulators and companies.
"This is a classic game theory problem: when the risks are shared, cooperation is in everyone’s interest," she said.
DOJ says AI safety coordination does not appear anticompetitive
Coordination on safety issues does not appear anticompetitive, a Justice Department antitrust official said on Thursday, amid a legal debate on rivals working together to keep cutting-edge artificial intelligence from posing threats to humanity.
Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, who leads the DOJ's Antitrust Division, said at Fordham University in New York that the DOJ was reviewing whether to update existing guidance allowing companies to coordinate on cybersecurity.
