Antitrust expert: AI CEOs' pledge to slow down likely wouldn't be an illegal cartel

neil_chilson · x · 2026-09-13

Antitrust scholar Neil Chilson argues David Sacks wasn't encouraging cartel-style coordination: each AI CEO unilaterally choosing not to race isn't an antitrust violation, and even conscious parallelism is legal.

He adds that even a signed pledge by Sam Altman and Dario Amodei to not build superintelligence would be hard to prosecute — the term is too vague to constitute a substantive agreement, it's not per se illegal conduct like price fixing, and procompetitive arguments could prevail under the rule of reason.

Related event: Legal Scholars Split on Whether AI Labs' Slowdown Talk Violates Antitrust Law(2 posts)→

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