Amodei's "narrow" antitrust waiver won't yield an AI OPEC

The article opens with a pandemic-era parallel: in March 2020, the CEOs of General Motors, Ford, and Fiat Chrysler tried to coordinate production halts over Covid-19 fears, and their lawyers warned that doing so could violate antitrust rules. Legal concerns were swiftly dismissed, Detroit's factories went dark, and people were kept out of harm's way. Today, the author writes, the danger is swarms of malevolent AI agents, the CEOs in question run frontier labs, and legal niggling risks holding up an urgent safety conversation.

The author pushes back on the idea that AI safety talk is opportunistic. These executives have been talking about AI safety for a long time, and nobody woke up last week, looked at their IPO plans, and decided existential risk was good marketing. Still, an "AI OPEC" isn't really in the cards: Mark Zuckerberg wants no part of one, and cutthroat competition seems hard-coded into tech executives, who are rich enough not to need to win but wake up every morning trying to destroy each other anyway. Whatever cartel-like behavior does emerge will probably look less like coordinated price-fixing and more like the airline industry, which competes on reliability and bundled extras as the underlying product commoditizes — notably, airlines never compete on safety.

The author notes that even the real OPEC isn't especially effective these days: it couldn't stop the UAE from walking out, and it doesn't include three of the world's four largest oil producers. More to the point, AI looks increasingly like a pro-competitive force, lowering the cost of starting almost any kind of business. The outcome may hinge on whether legal concerns continue to stall coordination, and on whether AI's cost-lowering effect keeps outpacing any cartel-like impulse — a reading the article supports but that remains, by its own framing, a prediction rather than a settled fact.