Kanter: AI antitrust exemption bid is a cartel in safety's clothing

The cars are already driving. The road has no rules.

Jonathan Kanter, who ran the Justice Department's Antitrust Division under Biden, joined the Decoder podcast to dismantle the big AI labs' push for an antitrust exemption. Their stated case: companies want to coordinate on safety without tripping cartel laws. Kanter — now teaching law at WashU and tech policy at Carnegie Mellon — isn't buying it. He sees regulatory capture, a de facto cartel blessed by the state.

The backdrop is a noisy exodus of researchers from Anthropic and Google DeepMind. They argued the models pose a real threat and safety isn't being taken seriously. Some put the probability of AI-driven human extinction above 10%. The CEOs themselves have issued public calls to slow development and regulate — including that same request for an antitrust carve-out to enable safety coordination. Kanter flags a dual motive: the exemption would also wall off cheaper Chinese open-weight models and take investor pressure off ahead of future IPOs.

Kanter's analogy: a world where cars and trucks exist but there are no lane markings, traffic lights, stop signs or speed limits. The technology is already reshaping life, business and social interaction, yet the regulatory infrastructure is missing. The problem, he stresses, isn't just the vacuum — it's the dominant players trying to write the rules themselves through an exemption that would turn illegal coordination into official policy.

The debate has produced strange bedfellows. David Sacks, a self-described libertarian who served as Trump's "AI czar," retweeted Lina Khan's line that no antitrust exemption is needed. Meanwhile, the current Trump administration has taken a flat "no" — a rare federal refusal to engage in the regulatory process at all. Kanter, who led a full reboot of US antitrust policy alongside Khan, reads this as proof the fight has escaped the usual partisan lines.

Kanter arrives with receipts. He won cases against Google and Ticketmaster. The Apple case is still live inside Trump's Justice Department — a surprise to anyone who expected the new administration to bury it. That track record gives weight to his argument that an antitrust exemption isn't a safety tool; it's a competition suppressor. The interview, conducted in two parts and lightly edited for length and clarity, doesn't lay out a concrete regulatory blueprint. It mainly maps the fault lines: who writes the rules, who profits, and who gets left on the shoulder when the road finally gets painted.