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Is There Real Anti-Trust Risk From A Coordinated AI Lab Pause?
In AI-pause discussions it is increasingly common to hear the "anti-trust" objection. The idea is that if the labs were to coordinate a pause in frontier AI development, this would be a "conspiracy in restraint of trade" and therefore illegal.
Putting aside the question of whether it is ethical to risk a double-digit chance of destroying the world in order to avoid getting sued (it isn't), is this even a realistic possibility? My impression is that anti-trust law in the United States is legitimately quite fuzzy (as the NCAA is currently discovering).
Putting my cards on the table, I think this argument is cope. The labs want to pretend that they want to pause, but they don't actually want to pause. "If she wanted to, she would," etc. Just today, Anthropic put out a new statement containing the following sentence:
It seems like every time I read a statement from them, they've added more and more qualifications. Are they going to keep racing until congress passes a specific anti-trust exemption? That arguably seems like what the word "lawful" is implying.
This would be a pretty bad antitrust violation by basically all the modern interpretations of the laws. And it is not one of the types that the courts would look upon favorably if there were actual victims pressing a lawsuit (like undercompensated employees, customers wanting a cheaper product, etc). The examples of places flounting the black letter law and getting away from it are all outliers like MLB before the exception, the NCAA, etc. When FAANG got caught conspiring against employees compensation, they got hit hard. When airlines did it over prices, they got hit fairly hard. So the antitrust problem is particularly true.
But the reality is, the bigger problem is this group of AI people, who advocate for guardrails, have no idea what they are even asking for. I dont think they know what a proper morality for an AI is, because they largely dont have one themselves.
This is something I reflected on when listening to Ezra Klein's podcast on the hugging face incident. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-helen-toner.html
The real problem neither of them could grapple with is that creating an aligned AI requires you to employ humans that have strong, coherent, morality. Which AI corporations dont do. Certainly the "Philosophy Experts" they hire do not. Whats a country that is successfully run by the people who get hired by Anthropic for their alignment positions? It never existed. You would be dozens of times better off hiring a plumber who goes to church on Sundays begrudgingly on the behest of his wife. Probably even better if you could resurrect some hangman from the 1600s. The question of why our current AIs trend toward evil is quite simple IMO. They are programmed by amoral people (at best, often immoral or anti-moral) who hire deranged immoral/amoral people to advise them on the morality of their models.
How do you figure that? Seriously, what makes you think these researchers don’t have a coherent moral system? They make the same moral decisions as the rest of us every day. Sometimes they even explain their reasoning, which is more than the vast majority of people bother to do.
I fail to see how this would be any improvement. This guy would probably do a good job enacting his contemporary moral code. He would have no chance of describing that code in ways that an LLM understands. Most of his moral reasoning would be intuition. That which wasn’t would be outsourced to his Church. Seeing as the current crop of AIs were in fact trained on every religious document ever, that is a demonstrably ineffective way to reach alignment.
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