Analysis
FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson said on September 15 that "everyone should be deeply suspicious" of AI companies that simultaneously lobby Washington for new regulation and seek an antitrust exemption, speaking at an event at Georgetown University, as multiple outlets reported. "If you're simultaneously coming to Washington and asking for a host of regulations and an antitrust exemption, all of my alarm bells go off," Ferguson said, according to the reporting.
Ferguson did not name Anthropic directly, but his comments respond to a proposal chief executive Dario Amodei made publicly the prior week: antitrust permission that would let rival AI labs coordinate a deliberately slower pace of frontier model development, on the grounds that safety evaluation needs to keep up with capability gains. Pulse has covered the broader context this idea sits inside -- a private working-group discussion among Anthropic, OpenAI and Google DeepMind about a FINRA-style AI standards body that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has separately lobbied President Trump against. That proposal, floated by Google DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis, involves a public-private evaluation body; Amodei's antitrust ask is a related but distinct request specifically about whether labs can legally coordinate pacing decisions with each other without running afoul of competition law.
“The labs are not unified on whether the exemption is even necessary.”
The labs are not unified on whether the exemption is even necessary. OpenAI's top policy executive, Chris Lehane, said the company has been working with rivals Anthropic and Google on AI safety discussions for weeks and does not see the need for a formal antitrust waiver for the three companies to talk. That puts OpenAI's stated position closer to Ferguson's skepticism than to Anthropic's request, even though all three labs are engaged in the same underlying conversation about coordinated pacing.
Antitrust exemptions for coordinated industry action are not unprecedented -- Congress has granted them selectively in sectors from insurance to professional sports leagues, typically after extensive hearings and with narrow, statutorily defined scope. What Amodei has proposed publicly is closer to a request for that kind of carve-out than a filed legal petition, and no formal FTC proceeding, complaint or rulemaking currently exists on the question. Ferguson's remarks are a policy stance delivered at a university event, which carries real signaling weight for how the FTC would likely respond to a future filing, but is a meaningfully different thing from an actual enforcement action.
The gap between rhetoric and formal action is exactly where this story currently sits, and it is worth being precise about that rather than treating a speech as a ruling. If Anthropic or any lab actually files for an antitrust waiver through the appropriate regulatory channel, Ferguson's Georgetown comments become a preview of how the FTC evaluates it. Until then, the practical effect is confined to the court of public opinion and to how labs calibrate their own public asks going forward -- Amodei's original proposal has not been withdrawn, and the standards-body conversations continue regardless.