WASHINGTON — Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s call for a narrow antitrust waiver so frontier AI labs can jointly set safety standards is meeting a hard no from key Republicans and the Trump-era FTC chair, The Hill (via NewsNation) reported Thursday, Sept. 17, 2026.

Amodei argued in a weekend blog that Congress is too slow and that labs should “voluntarily work together to set standards,” with the U.S. government mediating or at least enabling the talks. He said Washington need not run the conversations — only issue a “narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations.”

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) rejected that outright at a Senate Judiciary hearing Tuesday: “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? Absolutely no way that’s happening.”

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who chairs Senate Commerce, called the pitch “lunacy,” saying AI CEOs are asking for monopoly lock-in “so we can lock in our monopoly status and prevent any innovation from challenging us.” FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson, speaking in his personal capacity at Georgetown, said alarm bells go off when firms ask for “a host of regulations and an antitrust exemption” that could “insulate their incumbency from challenge.”

OpenAI’s global-affairs chief Chris LeHane told reporters the company has been operating “under the premise there is no need for an antitrust exemption” and is already talking with other labs about standards. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said new antitrust carve-outs are “completely unnecessary” because existing product laws already govern reliability. Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez warned that letting a handful of dominant firms “bend competition rules” would be “a cartel by any other name.” Asking for liability shields and the power to write the industry’s own safety rulebook is exactly the kind of concentrated private power Washington should not rubber-stamp.

Dated week of Sept. 15–17, 2026: Amodei seeks narrow antitrust waiver for AI safety talks; Hawley, Cruz, Ferguson, Nvidia, Cohere push back; OpenAI says no exemption needed.

Sources