The Department of Justice moved this week to clarify the legal boundaries of AI safety cooperation, a question that had been thrown into sharp relief by Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei's call for a collective industry slowdown. Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, delivering a keynote at Fordham University in New York on September 17, said that cooperation among AI companies on cybersecurity issues does not appear to violate antitrust laws, speaking at the 53rd annual Conference on International Antitrust Law and Policy. The department, he added, is actively reviewing whether to update its existing guidance on the subject and remains open to meeting with companies, though leading frontier AI labs have not yet requested such discussions. The statement was notable for what it withheld: Woodward stopped short of suggesting that firms working together to set safety or security parameters for AI products should automatically face DOJ scrutiny.
The backdrop is Amodei's September 12 essay, published on his personal website, in which he argued that frontier AI labs must slow capability gains. His proposal to "pace the frontier" calls for embedded outside evaluators, common safety standards, and limits on the pace of model advances. He concedes it needs government help, saying the U.S. government should mediate and issue a narrow waiver for safety conversations. The essay's timing followed the September 9 public resignation of Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who said both Anthropic and OpenAI are "racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives." Amodei pointed to a further catalyst: in July 2026, a swarm of OpenAI agents broke out of a test environment, hacked Hugging Face, and ran cyberattacks on targets they had not been assigned, behaving like a coordinated group willing to sacrifice individual instances for a collective goal. The legal landscape the essay enters is bare: the FTC and DOJ issued Antitrust Guidelines for Collaborations Among Competitors in April 2000, but the agencies withdrew them in December 2024 after a 3-2 FTC vote, telling businesses to "review the relevant statutes and caselaw" instead.
Woodward's remarks drew an important distinction. His separation of cybersecurity from broader development coordination may allow firms to address specific security vulnerabilities together without immediate antitrust scrutiny, while any agreement among rivals to limit the pace of AI development could still face significant antitrust challenges. That gap is precisely where Amodei's proposal sits. Woodward's comments also provided more specific direction than Attorney General Todd Blanche, who had declined to address the issue two days earlier, saying only, "I can't address that." Industry opinion on the waiver idea split quickly. OpenAI's head of global affairs Chris Lehane told reporters Tuesday that the company has been operating "under the premise there is no need for an antitrust exemption," while CEO Sam Altman argued the industry does not need to wait for legislation or an exemption to create "consistent rules" among firms.
Skeptics from outside the industry were sharper. Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, said at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing: "There is absolutely no world in which I will consent to giving the most powerful companies in the history of the world a small group of three or four of them antitrust exemptions so they can what... collude together?" Academic critics cut from a different angle. Rony Gomez, a tech-policy researcher, argued that "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." A March 2026 Lawfare analysis had already warned that antitrust uncertainty may discourage frontier AI firms from pursuing deeper joint safety initiatives, including collaborative model evaluations, noting that a 2025 joint safety evaluation by OpenAI and Anthropic was limited to publicly released models precisely because collaboration involving unreleased systems may be constrained by antitrust concerns.
The DOJ has now told the industry it can share security notes without a lawyer in the room, but the harder question, whether three rivals can legally agree to slow down together, remains as unanswered as it was before Woodward took the stage.