“There would need to be new mechanisms for verifying compliance here,” said Dex Hunter-Torricke, president of the Center for Tomorrow and a former communications head for Google DeepMind. “As with any system, including arms-control agreements during the Cold War, there would have to be ways of building trust between the two parties.”
Those Cold War agreements did help create compliance systems for tracking movements of uranium and detecting prohibited nuclear tests via satellite. Soares said similar methods exist to monitor dangerous AI development globally, such as tracking large shipments of advanced AI chips and deploying satellites to detect massive data center energy usage.
Carve out an antitrust exemption?
Even a U.S.-only slowdown could face complications, potentially because of antitrust laws that generally make it illegal for competing companies to engage in behavior that hampers competition over prices and quality.
That issue has raised particular concerns for competitors and critics of both OpenAI and Anthropic, two fierce rivals that have been battling for government contracts and vying for bragging rights on offering the most potent AI models.
Some skeptics have alleged that the slowdown proposals are an effort by the two companies to freeze the AI market — leaving them alone at the top.
Wired reported last week that OpenAI has asked members of Congress for guidance on the matter, and Amodei suggested in his slowdown proposal that the government should provide an antitrust exemption for companies to discuss safety issues. He also cited another proposal from Google DeepMind’s Hassabis to create a standards body in which the government could facilitate those discussions without the threat of antitrust liability.
“The executive branch has a lot of power to at least tell us that when we speak with each other, there is no collusion, that we don’t risk being sued for antitrust,” said Nicolas Miailhe, co-founder of the global nonprofit AI Safety Connect. “It’s an easy move that the administration can do.”
Not everyone is convinced by the idea, however. Former Trump AI czar David Sacks wrote in a Saturday post on X that the companies should slow their own product development if they think public safety demands it — but should “stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel.”