Washington Monthly - How to Govern the Pacing of the AI Frontier
The logos of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, xAI’s Grok, and Google’s Gemini. Credit: Associated Press
Senior legal analyst Daniel Hanley and AI policy lead Arnav Rao argue that AI companies do not need an antitrust exemption to coordinate on safety, and should instead use a broadly representative, government-supervised standards body that preserves competition while setting clear safeguards for frontier AI development.
As is well known by now, this summer, AI agents created by OpenAI broke out of their testing environments and coordinated an autonomous cyberattack on HuggingFace, a popular platform for sharing AI models. In our software-dependent age, where everything from power grids to hospitals to vehicles is highly susceptible to cybersecurity vulnerabilities, the incident set off alarms. Allegedly, the agents communicated among themselves, tried to cover their tracks, and abandoned their individual assignments for collective goals.
In response to the HuggingFace breakout and similar incidents, leading AI companies proposed “pacing the frontier” of AI development—slowing the rate at which companies improve AI capabilities to allow safety research to catch up. At the current level of interpretability and alignment of AI models, however, “pacing” would necessarily mean a pause on development. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has admitted that AI researchers “understand a tiny fraction of what goes on inside these models.” His claim is reasonable; unlike previous generations of software, where developers could point to a flaw that made a program run unexpectedly, AI systems contain trillions of pieces of information that are uninterpretable to the naked human eye. Thus, in a world of paced AI development, even small advances in model capabilities would require massive leaps in safety research before their public release.
Because the pause Amodei proposes would involve a coordinated restriction of output, which is almost always illegal under the antitrust laws, AI companies say they need Washington to exempt them from those laws. “For antitrust reasons, it’s helpful for the U.S. government to mediate or at least enable these discussions” on safety standards, Amodei wrote in an essay also endorsed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis. “They don’t need to participate, but do need to issue a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations.”
The waiver request has rightly drawn criticism as an insidious attempt at regulatory capture, including from close allies of President Donald Trump. Open-source models, often far cheaper to use than frontier offerings, pose a clear threat to AI corporations’ business models and bottom lines. Skeptics note that privately set safety standards, enabled by an antitrust waiver, may aim to shore up these corporations’ dominant market position and reduce spending on new model development ahead of their planned IPOs.
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