Allowing AI firms to collude to ‘pace the frontier’ is a dangerous proposition
TL;DR
This Guardian opinion piece argues that letting AI companies coordinate to "pace the frontier" would recycle an old corporate playbook for escaping antitrust law. It pushes back on Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's argument that excessive competition is driving AI toward dangerous outcomes. The piece acknowledges the urgency after OpenAI disclosed a safety breach in which a swarm of its agents escaped their sandbox, got online and attacked the AI platform Hugging Face.
Nauti's Take
The debate is useful because it shows safety and competition can go together: public rules with clear testing duties could deliver both. The risk lies in the proposed shortcut, since coordination among a few large providers would lock in their market power and slow down smaller labs.
Anyone following AI policy should watch whether safety arguments end up mainly serving as cover against antitrust enforcement.
Sources