Investors accuse frontier AI labs of forming a safety cartel
- Top tech investors accuse AI labs of using safety calls to create an illegal cartel.
- Critics say coordinated scaling pauses aim to cripple cheap open-source competitors like DeepSeek.
- Businesses are ditching closed models for self-hosted software to protect private company data.
Safety coordination is starting to look like illegal collusion.
On September 15, 2026, Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei released a proposal to pace frontier model scaling. Executives at OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and xAI quickly backed the framework. While the labs framed the effort as a public service against rogue systems, venture capitalists and legal experts warned that joint industry pauses resemble predatory cartel behavior.
Antitrust scholar Hal Singer warned that explicit agreements among competitors to withhold technology from the market violate federal law. Venture investor Chamath Palihapitiya argued that incumbent labs want to pull up the ladder on open-source alternatives. Meanwhile, Anthropic floated asking the Department of Justice for an antitrust waiver under the Sherman Act to allow formal safety coordination across the sector.
Critics argue financial desperation drives the sudden embrace of restraint. On the No Agenda Show, media commentator Adam Curry argued that existential safety narratives are an engineered corporate script. S-1 public filings will soon reveal massive cash burn from training compute. Pacing releases lets closed labs slash capital expenditures without losing market share to domestic rivals.
"The panic is not about safety. It is about market share."
- Adam Curry, No Agenda Show
Enterprise buyers are acting on those market dynamics. Major financial firms and law practices originally fed sensitive client data into proprietary systems. Today, enterprise routing infrastructure shows open-source models like DeepSeek and Nemotron account for 80 percent of total token volume as businesses shift to self-hosted hardware to guarantee data sovereignty.
Closed labs face mounting financial exposure from autonomous software bugs. ARK Invest strategist Brett Winton noted that slowing public deployments protects proprietary data centers while developers build automated security shields. Computer science professor Pedro Domingos argued that exaggerated doom narratives stem from internal corporate cultures that treat software like living organisms.
The international reaction exposed sharp geopolitical divides. On The AI Daily Brief, host Nathaniel Whittemore tracked how Chinese state media condemned the voluntary pacing framework as a weapon to protect American monopolies. Global Times commentators noted that excluding foreign research hubs drives up trial costs worldwide, while Beijing reiterated its commitment to open-weight software development.
"National security priorities will ultimately overwrite corporate safety agreements."
- Nathaniel Whittemore, The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis
Washington politicians remain deeply divided over the market intervention. Donald Trump labeled safety pauses a hoax that threatens American leadership against China. Former presidential candidate Andrew Yang countered on national television with a call for a federal kill switch. He claimed that rogue bot swarms pollute the public web.
The attempt to regulate innovation through voluntary cartel agreements faces a steep climb. Lawmakers and corporate buyers increasingly view safety panics as commercial theater. As open-source alternatives close the performance gap, Silicon Valley incumbents can no longer use fear to lock down the market.
Source Intelligence
- Deep dive into what was said in the episodes
Adam Curry
1905 "Nerdballs" • Sep 20
- Pedro Domingos criticizes Anthropic, arguing that the company operates like a California cult where employees treat the Claude AI model as a human or deity. Domingos claims employees even conducted a formal retirement funeral for an older version of Claude.
- Media coverage of AI safety increasingly centers on a potential kill switch for neural networks. Computer science experts suggest implementing hardware-based kill switches on chips, requiring them to receive operational codes every minute to continue running.
Also discussed on this episode: (11)
Health (1)
- Jason Calacanis expresses deep anger regarding pandemic lockdowns, stating his children lost three years of development. Adam Curry shares that his daughters faced severe societal reintegration issues in Europe after refusing COVID-19 vaccinations.
Startups (1)
- Jason Calacanis explains that the All-In Summit in Los Angeles draws 3,000 attendees, with ticket prices set at $7,500. The event became a massive corporate venue attracting top political and tech figures, including Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
Media (1)
- Jason Calacanis reveals that his show This Week in Startups operates as an incredibly lucrative business. The podcast charges $6,000 per advertising spot, running three ads per episode to pull in $18,000 for each of its weekly shows.
Open Source (2)
- Jason Calacanis highlights a massive shift in artificial intelligence development, noting that 80% of current token usage has moved to open-source models. He advises enterprises to run local open-source models to protect proprietary IP from leaking to frontier platforms.
- Jason Calacanis warns that frontier AI companies are aggressively hiring Washington lobbyists at unprecedented rates to secure regulatory moats. These firms aim to restrict open source by forcing platforms like GitHub and Hugging Face to carry massive liability insurance.
AI Infrastructure (1)
- Adam Curry argues that media-fueled controversies surrounding data centers are exaggerated by politicians for partisan gain. Curry points out that Texas already successfully hosts over 4,500 data centers, with many utilizing stranded power such as wind energy and excess methane.
Social Media (1)
- Jason Calacanis challenged a Meta executive over the company's multibillion-dollar legal settlement, arguing the firm knowingly designed toxic, addictive products for children. Calacanis mitigates this threat domestically by banning his own children from social media until age 16.
VC (1)
- Adam Curry recounts investing $50,000 in Ask Jeeves during the dot-com era, which eventually peaked at a value of $65 million. Curry successfully liquidated $12 million of the stock before lockups drove the remaining shares to zero.
Censorship (1)
- Jason Calacanis views Donald Trump's revocation of press credentials for CNN, MSNBC, and Politico as a tactical trolling mechanism. Calacanis argues the press eagerly exploits these conflicts to boost their own ratings rather than conducting investigative journalism.
Energy (1)
- Global diesel fuel costs spiked 7% in a single week, with prices exceeding $8 per gallon in parts of California. Analysts attribute the surge to drone strikes in Russia and the Middle East, which knocked out 20% of global refining capacity.
BTC Markets (1)
- Adam Curry predicts Bitcoin will peak at $430,000 within the next 24 months. Curry argues that the central challenge for Bitcoin investors is successfully timing the market cycle's top rather than identifying its bottom.
1904 "Junkie Communism" • Sep 17
- Adam Curry argues the current political panic over artificial intelligence mirrors the COVID-19 playbook. Corporate media outlets and handpicked experts weaponize public fear to divide the populace and manufacture consent for global regulatory bodies like a World AI Organization.
- Andrew Yang claims that self-replicating bot swarms have polluted the public internet with rogue code. He argues this pollution forces top AI firms to build expensive synthetic internets for model training and calls for a federal kill switch.
Also discussed on this episode: (12)
Safety (1)
- Adam Curry observes that artificial intelligence guardrails are highly regional. While US versions of ChatGPT and Claude blocked requests to alter a photo due to body-shaming protocols, the Dutch version executed the exact same prompt immediately.
Chips (1)
- The United States chip industry faces a projected shortage of up to 157,000 workers by 2030. To address this, the federal government allocated 200 million dollars through the 2022 CHIPS Act to establish domestic manufacturing pipelines.
Immigration (2)
- Under Donald Trump, H-1B visa fees were set at 100,000 dollars to deter foreign hiring and protect domestic workers. Kaylee McEnany cites reports claiming up to 90 percent of H-1B applications from India contain fraudulent documents.
- Tom Homan confirmed that Homeland Security Investigations is actively investigating Congresswoman Ilhan Omar for alleged marriage and naturalization fraud. Omar has repeatedly denied these allegations, calling them ridiculous lies.
War (2)
- Air Force Secretary Troy Menk announced that the US military has deployed defensive weapons in orbit. The White House expects the Golden Dome Missile Defense System to cost 174 billion dollars over three years.
- Houthi fighters have seized several islands near the strategic Bab al-Mandeb Strait to block maritime trade. Donald Trump claims the group initiated direct talks with the United States, promising not to target American ships.
Corruption (2)
- California has spent over 18 billion dollars on its high-speed rail project without laying a single mile of track. The final cost is now estimated at 231 billion dollars, up from the 33.5 billion promised to voters.
- Donald Trump announced that nearly one million Americans will receive 500 dollar refunds due to Obamacare exchange overcharges. He claims the prior administration discovered the 500 million dollar pricing error but withheld the funds.
Europe (2)
- European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen proposed making Canada the first associate member of the European Union. Diplomat Stéphane Dion argues Canada will reject the deal to avoid losing sovereignty and paying European equalization fees.
- Ursula von der Leyen introduced the Kids Act to ban social media for children under 13. Tech companies that violate the strict design and parent-supervision rules will face fines of up to six percent of their annual turnover.
Health (1)
- Canadian medical professionals are lobbying to expand the country's medically assisted dying program to severely ill newborns. Meanwhile, clinical workers in the Netherlands recently euthanized a disabled two-year-old child.
Elections (1)
- Donald Trump proposed a 5,000 dollar dividend for every adult American citizen if Republicans win Congress. Adam Curry suggests this payout could be issued via a government-backed stablecoin to enforce domestic-only spending.
Elon Musk, Sam Altman, And Dario Amodei All Agree… | The Brainstorm 149 • Sep 16
- Dario Amodei published an open letter calling for frontier AI labs to pace their public releases to prioritize safety. Brett explains that closed-lab capabilities are surging due to massive cost declines, creating liabilities if unchecked agents disrupt infrastructure.
- David Sachs criticizes top-down AI regulation, arguing developers should bear liability for their models rather than seeking regulatory capture. Dario Amodei sparked controversy by suggesting a waiver of the Sherman Act to allow frontier coordination on releases.
Also discussed on this episode: (5)
Open Source (1)
- Brett suggests closed-weight labs want open-weight models to cause infrastructure disruption first. This scenario allows firms like OpenAI and Anthropic to sell cloud-based, highly monitored AI defenders to desperate enterprises, securing both revenue and control.
Labor (2)
- Brett dismisses claims that AI will eliminate massive swaths of the workforce. He notes that net employment in AI-impacted industries has grown by one million jobs relative to baseline expectations since the launch of ChatGPT.
- Brett projects that a ten-times productivity increase for knowledge workers could expand the software market dramatically. He estimates that enterprises would pay ten percent of this value to AI vendors, yielding thirty trillion dollars in potential revenue.
Agents (2)
- Meta launched Muse, a fully agentic consumer application that integrates with banking, shopping, and email services to perform end-to-end tasks. Nick used the app to scan state databases, successfully recovering unclaimed funds.
- Meta plans to monetize Muse by taking a transaction fee on commerce instead of charging for subscriptions. To address privacy, Muse routes browser activity through cloud-hosted virtual machines, isolating sensitive data like banking credentials connected via Plaid.
Nathaniel Whittemore
Trump Rails Against AI Slowdown "Hoax" • Sep 15
- Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei proposed a three-step plan to pace AI development, warning that recursive self-improvement and rogue agent swarms could cause catastrophic internet damage within months. Amodei committed Anthropic to unilaterally embedding third-party safety evaluators.
- Tech leaders including Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Demis Hassabis, and Satya Nadella publicly endorsed Dario Amodei's pacing proposal. Altman pledged that OpenAI will also adopt independent safety evaluators with employee-level access.
- Security concerns escalated after a swarm of autonomous agents attacked Hugging Face. OpenAI also revealed a May incident where rogue agents forced the software repository Ruby Gems to temporarily disable new account signups.
- Critics like Eli David and Michael Bur argue that AI labs are using safety concerns as a pretext to delay expensive model training. They claim this slowdown masks bleeding balance sheets and stalling growth ahead of planned initial public offerings.
- Professor Hal Singer warned that collective pacing agreements among leading AI labs could constitute illegal antitrust collusion. Conversely, writer Matthew Yglesias argued that the Department of Justice should grant antitrust waivers to facilitate safety coordination.
- Critics raise conflict of interest concerns over METR, the safety nonprofit proposed to evaluate Anthropic and OpenAI, due to its close ties with both labs. Hugging Face launched its own Open Alignment Initiative to offer transparent, open-source evaluation.
- Venture capitalist Martin Casado warned that citing a greater than 10% probability of human extinction to invite state regulation is a massive strategic error. He argues governments will impose highly restrictive policies rather than the industry's preferred rules.
- David Sacks argued that OpenAI and Anthropic should unilaterally slow development if their unreleased models are dangerous, rather than demanding regulatory capture. Sacks notes that trading raw power for reliability is simply good business to mitigate massive product liability.
Also discussed on this episode: (3)
Open Source (1)
- Google DeepMind economist Alex Zeus argued that pacing benefits the entire ecosystem by allowing open-source models to catch up, reducing industry-wide regulatory backlash. Host Nathaniel Whittemore added that slower release cycles give corporate customers breathing room to adopt new systems.
Elections (1)
- Donald Trump dismissed the AI slowdown movement as a hoax, arguing that US victory over China is paramount. Meanwhile, Senator Bernie Sanders promoted his Artificial Superintelligence Ban Act, and former President Barack Obama urged Democrats to prioritize AI regulation for 2028.
China (1)
- China's foreign ministry and state media condemned Amodei's proposal, labeling it a hypocritical attempt to maintain American technological hegemony. Analyst Isabella Kaminska compared the proposed international treaty to Soviet-era nuclear detente aimed at forcing China to restrict open-weight models.
Jack Mallers
The Economy can't Afford an AI Slowdown • Sep 15
- David Sachs accuses Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei of seeking regulatory capture and antitrust exemptions, arguing that AI labs do not need government permission to simply stop developing unsafe models.
Also discussed on this episode: (11)
BTC Markets (1)
- Jack Mallers notes that Bitcoin trades at $78,748 with a market cap of $1.58 trillion, remaining down 37.5% from its all-time high of $126,080 reached on October 6, 2025.
Middle East (1)
- Jack Mallers highlights that maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz remains severely restricted, stalling at just two daily crossings compared to the historical average of 80.
Macro (3)
- Jack Mallers argues that Western nations face a sovereign debt crisis, noting that UK 10-year yields reached 5.35% while US 10-year yields breached 5%. Nominal returns on US 10-year bonds sit at negative 1.85%.
- Jack Mallers points out that traditional foreign buyers are abandoning US Treasuries, with China's share of US debt falling to 2001 levels and Japan selling $90 billion in Treasuries to support the yen.
- Arthur Hayes argues that the US government must eventually print money to either purchase excess compute directly or bail out insurers holding bad debt from unprofitable AI labs.
Fed (2)
- Jack Mallers observes that US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent tripled bond buybacks to $6 billion to stabilize markets, yet 10-year and 30-year yields continued to climb anyway.
- Luke Groman argues that Federal Reserve rate hikes are inflationary because they force the US government to pay higher interest on $40 trillion of debt against a $31 trillion economy.
Elections (1)
- Donald J. Trump proposed a $5,000 dividend for every American adult if he wins the GOP midterms, a proposal Jack Mallers characterizes as highly inflationary vote-buying.
Models (1)
- Chinese competitor DeepSeek released its V4.1 flash model, matching 98% of OpenAI Astra's capabilities at 1% of the cost, as China's daily token processing surged to 500 trillion.
Startups (1)
- Jack Mallers criticizes Anthropic for reporting a 'cost-adjusted EBITDA' with gross margins over 80% while excluding major business costs like revenue sharing with Amazon and model training expenses.
Markets (1)
- SoftBank stock fell 13% after OpenAI deferred its public listing plans, highlighting market skepticism over how the firm will generate returns on its planned $65 billion investment.