One signal

Neil Chilson, the FTC's former Chief Technologist and now AI policy head at the Abundance Institute, has a caution for the safety-coordination push: give frontier AI labs government-backed antitrust exemptions and you risk a durable cartel that harms competition. He made the case to Bloomberg's Ed Ludlow on 18 September.

Why it matters

Collaboration needs no carve-out, he argues: companies can agree safety standards under existing antitrust rules, and today's consumer-protection and liability laws already cover AI harms. Competition law can stay put. Cohere's chief executive Aidan Gomez has made the cartel case from inside the industry; Chilson brings the antitrust credentials. That makes the question testable: would an exemption buy independent oversight, or simply redraw the rules in the incumbents' favour?

Discuss: If frontier labs say safety coordination only works with an antitrust exemption, does that prove the standards are necessary, or that the exemption is the point?

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