OpenAI Wants to Know if an AI Industry Slowdown Would Even Be Legal

OpenAI has asked members of Congress in recent weeks for clear guidance about whether orchestrating an industry-wide slowdown on frontier AI development would be legal, people close to the company tell WIRED.

Substantive coordination on safety between AI labs may risk running afoul of antitrust law, the people say, which poses a significant obstacle to bringing major tech giants on board with the effort.

Last weekend, OpenAI’s chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, published a blog post arguing that the best path forward for the AI research world includes “coordinating to slow down future development,” which he thinks will be key to ensuring that self-improving AI systems are safe. In the short term, he expects “voluntary slowdowns to become commonplace until shared safety bars are established.”

But some legal scholars say such an effort could conflict with US antitrust laws. Nicholas Felstead, assistant director of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and a former AI policy fellow at the Center for Law & AI Risk, argued in a March article that a coordinated pause in AI development may amount to companies restricting output, potentially violating the Sherman Antitrust Act. It would depend “entirely on the precise details of any agreement,” Felstead wrote. “But even if most safety collaborations would ultimately survive antitrust scrutiny, legal uncertainty can act as a powerful deterrent.”