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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.
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."
Why would the current winners of the race want this? This would be catastrophic for their companies as others caught up. Ironically its the current losers that would cynically want this as it would allow them to catch up. I'm so tired of these takes that hallucinate some cynical interest that falls apart in two seconds of thought because it's impossible to imagine that the type of people who have been publicly posting about and discussing the dangerous ai since before the industry existed could possibly care about the singular thing they've been warning about for over a decade.
Who? Who the fuck are these other better mouse trap makers that they're afraid of? it doesn't make any sense. If signaling that they're willing to give up their lead isn't enough to show you that they are serious about the problem then what possible action could change your mind?
Perhaps because they anticipate or hope that the applicable regulations would impose a lot of bureaucratic hurdles and red tape on new players in the industry.
There are already multi-billion dollar hurdles for new players in the industry to put together enough compute to train a frontier model, the idea that having a legal department is going to be the difference is absurd. This isn't a haircutting industry.
Big companies start off as small companies. Anti-competitive regulation rarely targets the hard-to-kill large companies and instead strangles the small companies to ensure there's nobody around to grow into a big company.
Frontier models also aren't their only competition. Anthropic and OpenAI have both shown a desire to raise prices which is going to make budget and self hosted models more appealing alternatives as they do. Adding large costs to everyone in the industry doesn't just put a big barrier to entry up but also brings budget options closer on price to the big players.
I know what regulatory capture is. I'm asking how the type of regulatory capture being discussed could possibly apply to a product class that takes billions of dollars to bring to market in any scenario. Stop pattern matching and look at the actual fact pattern it's absurd. If a small business was able to bring a frontier model to market alone then we have a whole lot of other things to worry about.
Does it really take billions of dollars? Wasn't Mistral 7B developed for $1 million or so, and Mistral Large for less than $100 million? Didn't DeepSeek or whoever launch a successful model with a low-end stated cost of a few million dollars? Google says that estimates are that they did that with a hardware investment of less than $2 billion, so I guess there's a number of different ways to creatively make the costs seem lower than the true cost of doing business...but if compute costs really are dropping it stands to reason that developing new models will be cheaper in the future, not more expensive...right?
I realize the obvious counter-response is "well but those aren't cutting edge" but as far as I can tell, most people using Anthropic and ChatGPT aren't using their cutting edge models. Thus is seems like edging out smaller providers protects the majority of the primes' customer base (although to be fair I am not sure how much of the majority of the primes' customer base is actually paying for their compute.)
Mistral is not a frontier lab and no model they've ever trained would trigger any of the proposed regulatory scrutiny.
No they didn't. The number you're thinking of was the money they spent getting an already existing model to work with chain of thought.
Ok sure, but in the coutnerfactual world where there is no regulation the current frontier labs will have substantially better models.
If they're not cutting edge then the regulations do not apply. They're trying to pace the frontier, not dinky merely hundreds of millions of dollars models.
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