FTC leadership opposes proposed antitrust exemptions for AI infrastructure companies, maintaining regulatory scrutiny on hyperscaler consolidation.

The chairman of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission said Tuesday that "everyone should be deeply suspicious" about AI companies seeking antitrust exemptions while simultaneously lobbying for new regulations.

FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson was expressing his personal opinion and did not directly name Anthropic, whose CEO called last week for antitrust permission to enable rivals to coordinate a slower pace to AI development due to safety concerns.

Public concern about the potential dangers posed by artificial intelligence has intensified following Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon's announcement that he resigned in part because the "people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade."

Ferguson's comments mark the first public signal of how the Trump administration views Anthropic's bid for an antitrust exemption to collaborate on mitigating AI risk, and underscore how AI regulation is sometimes perceived as a tool large tech companies use to block rivals.

Speaking at an event at Georgetown University, Ferguson said President Donald Trump would set AI policy for the federal government. "If companies are simultaneously coming to Washington asking for a host of regulations and an antitrust exemption, all of my alarm bells go off," he said. "They're asking for barriers to entry that will insulate their incumbency from challenge. And if you combine that with the requested antitrust exemption, everyone should be deeply suspicious about this."

OpenAI's top lobbyist Chris Lehane said the company has been working with rivals Anthropic and Alphabet's Google on AI safety for several weeks and does not believe an antitrust waiver is needed for the three companies to discuss safety matters, according to Bloomberg.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called Friday for an intentional slowdown of AI development and an exemption to standard prohibitions on competitors coordinating. AI agents could become capable of shutting down the internet within six months, causing billions of dollars in damage, he warned. The U.S. government would "need to issue a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations," he wrote.

Antitrust experts and smaller competitors criticized the proposal, noting that existing legal doctrines already apply in such situations and permit coordination on preventing catastrophic risk. Several experts pointed to a prior statement by U.S. antitrust authorities stating that information sharing among companies on cybersecurity is permitted under antitrust law.

Industry figures also objected to the plan. Aidan Gomez, co-founder of Canadian AI company Cohere, called it the "latest in a string of recent efforts by Silicon Valley incumbents to shape the regulatory landscape surrounding AI" in a blog post Sunday. "If this is the most consequential technology in human history, then the rules for it cannot be written by a small group of commercially aligned companies behind an antitrust waiver," Gomez wrote.