Washington balks at giving AI firms waiver to create safety standard 

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‘You can’t trust anything’ from Anthropic, OpenAI leaders, lawyer says

‘You can’t trust anything’ from Anthropic, OpenAI leaders, lawyer says

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s call for an antitrust waiver for AI firms to work together on a safety standard is being met with skepticism in Washington, where policymakers are questioning tech leaders’ intentions. 

Congress has failed repeatedly to pass AI regulations for years, but some lawmakers are balking at the idea of technology companies taking the lead amid Washington’s inaction. 

Both Washington and Silicon Valley are facing mounting pressure to do more to prevent the catastrophic risks of AI, but neither sector has enough consensus, resulting in a blame game.

Multiple lawmakers, agency heads and smaller technology leaders came out against Amodei’s idea this week, suggesting it could be used to shield the biggest firms from liability and allow them to steer long-sought regulations.

“There is absolutely no world in which I will consent to giving the most powerful companies in the history of the world — a small group of three or four of them — antitrust exemptions so they can what … collude together? Absolutely no way that’s happening,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing with FBI Director Kash Patel on Tuesday. 

Amodei’s suggestion of an antitrust waiver was part of his broader blog post last weekend, where he called for a slowdown of the technology’s development in response to a flurry of panic caused by an ominous warning from former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon last week. 

Coxon, a previously little-known AI researcher who has also worked at OpenAI, went viral on social media after claiming researchers at frontier firms “believe AI could kill humans” but have not slowed development toward superintelligence, a hypothetical AI agent........

© The Hill