US FTC chair suspicious of calls for AI antitrust exemptions

US Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson said AI companies' requests for antitrust exemptions while lobbying for new regulations should raise "deep suspicions." The trigger was Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's call to let competitors coordinate slowing AI development for safety.

• Ferguson: combining regulation requests and antitrust exemption creates "barriers to entry"
• Amodei proposed a narrow antitrust exemption for AI safety talks
• OpenAI said it has discussed safety with Anthropic and Google for weeks without exemptions
• Cohere co-founder Gomez criticized attempts by "Silicon Valley incumbents" to shape regulation