EU open to AI safety cooperation under antitrust rules

EU competition chief Teresa Ribera said Brussels would consider giving AI companies more room to coordinate on safety without breaching antitrust law, though no formal request has been submitted. Ribera said existing EU rules already allow competitors to work together in some public-interest cases, provided the terms are clearly defined and regulators are informed.

The issue gained momentum after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for leading labs to agree on shared safety standards and “limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress.” He argued that lawful cooperation would require the U.S. government to “issue a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations.” OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella later backed the idea independently.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen also told lawmakers that executives from the most advanced AI companies believe it is time to slow work on self-recursive models, or systems that improve themselves. She said she would invite frontier labs to discuss how Europe can support efforts to pace development, but did not address competition law.

Washington’s response has been more skeptical. Federal Trade Commission chair Andrew Ferguson warned that companies seeking new regulation and antitrust exemptions may be trying to protect incumbents, while Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent rejected a separate industry push for liability protection.