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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   5529 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 31, 2026

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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:

"To be clear about where we stand: we believe the world would benefit if the industry adopted a lawful, verifiable, effective mechanism for coordinated pacing as soon as possible."

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.

Perhaps I am too cynical but the call for government coordination seems like an obvious attempt to build themselves a moat in a largely moatless space. My own experience has been the cost of model switching is near 0. Approximately all the agents, skills, whatever I've used in my job work pretty seamlessly for any of the underlying models. Some have their quirks but essentially all of them are good enough.

"We the current frontier mousetrap makers think it should be ILLEGAL for anyone to build a better mousetrap faster than we can, for the good of humanity."

Perhaps I am too cynical but the call for government coordination seems like an obvious attempt to build themselves a moat in a largely moatless space.

I tend to agree with this. Quite possibly the company that revolutionizes AI hasn't even been founded yet and surely the current big players are aware of this type of vulnerability. That they will end up being the Yahoo and AskJeeves of AI. It's hard to imagine that this isn't informing their thinking.

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