Do Anthropic and OpenAI want AI regulation to save humanity, or are they just trying to squeeze out competition?

AI giants Anthropic and OpenAI suddenly started sounding a five-alarm fire last week, insisting their tech is just too good, developing too fast for humanity to handle and could kill us all. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wants to “slow the pace” of the entire AI industry and demanded government intervention.

Just hours later, OpenAI chief Sam Altman chimed in to say he agreed, as did Elon Musk.Business leaders were quick to point out that nothing is stopping these companies from independently slowing their innovation.But nobody would deliberately handicap themselves — it seems what they really want is for the government to bring in industry-wide regulation.

Such a move would quickly squelch many of the smaller players, while the biggest companies — namely Anthropic and OpenAI — would be able to ride it out.It’s a well-worn playbook of regulatory capture: Incumbents warn of impending catastrophe and agitate for regulation, which handily prevents competitors from eclipsing them. Amodei also advocated in a blog post for Washington to give frontier labs a so-called antitrust waiver, which would allow them to coordinate with one another without raising federal collusion or monopoly concerns — essentially a pass for companies to regulate themselves — to ensure safety.Now, you don’t need an antitrust waiver to make sure technology is safe, as former FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya pointed out.You do need one if you’re looking to coordinate on other areas beyond keeping people safe.

Any wavier, as Bedoya put it, “should be met with deep skepticism in light of the economics of the industry and the threat they face from open [source] models.”In some respects, I can’t blame them for taking this approach.These companies have burned hundreds of billions in development and are still losing money — OpenAI lost approximately $39 billion in 2025 — so they depend on hitting record-setting values in their IPOs.And while their technology may be used to...