DOJ Antitrust Chief Signals Openness to AI Safety Coordination

A senior official at the US Department of Justice's antitrust division said on Thursday that coordination between companies on safety issues does not appear to be anticompetitive, weighing in on a growing legal debate over whether rival artificial intelligence firms should be allowed to work together to curb risks from frontier models.

Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, who leads the antitrust division, made the remarks during a speech at Fordham University in New York. He said the department was examining whether to revise its existing guidance that permits companies to coordinate on cybersecurity matters.

"It doesn't occur to me that coordinating on cyber security or security is anti-competitive," Woodward said, according to the account of his address.

He added that the antitrust division remains open to meeting with companies on such questions, and noted that frontier AI laboratories have not yet sought a meeting to discuss antitrust concerns.

The comments come amid rising public anxiety about the potential dangers of advanced artificial intelligence. Last week, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for antitrust authorities to permit rivals to coordinate a slower pace of AI development on safety grounds.

Those concerns were amplified after Jacob Coxon, a researcher at Anthropic, said he had resigned in part because the people building AI earnestly believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade.

The debate places two policy priorities in tension: competition law designed to prevent collusion among rivals, and safety considerations that some argue may require coordinated restraint in the development of powerful AI systems.