OpenAI has asked members of the US Congress whether an industry-wide slowdown in artificial intelligence development, coordinated among rival labs, would violate antitrust law. The company's chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, has called for coordinating such a slowdown until shared safety standards are in place.
Antitrust concerns
The concern, reported by The Decoder, is that if OpenAI coordinated a safety-related slowdown with rivals such as Anthropic and Google DeepMind, the arrangement could be read as companies jointly restricting output, a potential violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has said the company could slow its pace of development, possibly alongside other labs, though he acknowledged that some competitors probably would not go along with it.
The request for guidance lands as Congress considers a bipartisan bill introduced in July, the Collaboration on Adversarial Threats and Security Risks Act, which would shield certain security-related collaborations between AI companies from antitrust liability. The bill remains pending before the Judiciary Committee. According to Decrypt, the legislative interest follows a period in which safety commitments were relaxed in February 2026, and in which the White House first delayed its own executive order on AI in May before signing it in June.
Industry pressure builds
Miranda Bogen, chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told Decrypt that commercial and geopolitical competition in the AI sector is "incredibly intense," creating a dynamic in which companies are pushed to release products before their risks are understood. Duncan Sabien, head of communications at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, argued that "every advance under current conditions yields many millions or billions more in funding," strengthening the position of whoever produces it. Jacob Coxon, a former Anthropic engineer, told the outlet that people building the technology genuinely believe it could kill everyone.
Pressure inside the labs has been building. A petition signed in July by more than 1,000 employees at major AI companies called for mechanisms to pace development, and Jared Kaplan, Anthropic's chief science officer, is among the senior researchers Decrypt cites in the debate. OpenAI itself paused internal work on a project known as Astra in August, according to Decrypt. Senators Adam Schiff and Jim Banks are named in the reporting as figures in the congressional discussion.
It remains unclear whether Congress will offer OpenAI a formal opinion, or how quickly. For now, the antitrust question leaves the company in a bind: it says it could slow down, but fears that coordinating with competitors to do so could itself be illegal, a tension likely to keep shaping how AI labs discuss safety commitments in public.