Amodei Asked for an Antitrust Waiver. Nobody Agreed on What It Would Cover.

Dario Amodei’s pacing essay, published in September 2026, makes one concrete request of the US government. The US government, he writes, does “need to issue a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations.” A footnote on the same page puts it even more briefly: “With government mediation or waivers of antitrust restrictions.”

Aidan Gomez, CEO of Cohere, read the same essay and described the request this way on September 13: “because it’s normally illegal for competitors to agree to limit what they produce, the plan asks governments for a narrow antitrust waiver to make that coordination lawful.”

Both passages turn on the word “narrow” attached to an antitrust waiver. They do not describe the same thing. They do not describe the same thing. One clears a channel for competitors to exchange safety information. The other clears competitors to agree on how much they produce. A week of public argument ran on top of that word without anyone pinning down which instrument the proposal actually requires.

Two Instruments Wearing One Name

A waiver covering conversations and a waiver covering agreements differ in what they permit after the meeting ends. The first lets rivals sit in a room and compare notes on a risk. The second lets them leave the room bound to a number. Amodei’s own text points at the first: “safety conversations,” with the government present only to “mediate or at least enable.” Gomez’s reading points at the second, and he is explicit about why. Coordination on output is what antitrust law normally forbids, so a waiver has to reach that far for the plan to function.

Neither man is being careless. They are describing different points on a spectrum, and the essay does not fix the point. The word “narrow” does the work of a definition in both readings while carrying no content in either.

That is a governance problem before it is a policy disagreement. We have argued before that compute access and frontier-model access are one governance surface. The failure mode in front of us is a different one: a term enters the debate, everyone adopts it, and the observable it refers to is never stated.

The Clause the Critics Anchored On

Amodei’s case for coordination rests on a commercial argument as much as a safety one. A coordinated strategy, he writes, “would give frontier AI developers the time to do this vital work without sacrificing commercial advantage.”

Gomez took that clause as the tell. “A mechanism that slows everyone down while explicitly preserving existing commercial advantage does not make AI safer.” Read alongside the waiver ambiguity, the objection sharpens. If the waiver covers conversations, preserving commercial advantage is a side effect. If it covers output agreements, preserving commercial advantage is the mechanism, because an output agreement among incumbents freezes their relative positions by construction.

The economic pressure behind the proposal is real and independently argued. Cogito Ergo Sum, writing the same month, put the bind in one line: “labs cannot economically slow down on their own, and they also cannot afford not to.” The same analysis fits the price of intelligence to a half-life of 45.82 days across five releases with 90 or more days of history, and rounds it to a headline: “The price of intelligence halves every 46 days.” A firm facing that curve has no unilateral move that survives contact with its board. Coordination is the only exit the economics leaves open, which is precisely why the legal shape of the coordination deserves a sharper word than “narrow.”

The Objection That Denies the Premise

Two critics, both reported by Tomasz Tunguz, refuse the framing entirely rather than arguing about its scope.

David Sacks: “Stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel.” Lina Khan, who chaired the FTC until 2025: “We shouldn’t let discussions about new legal regimes distract from the fact that there’s no AI exemption from laws already on the books.”

Both quotes reach us through Tunguz’s reporting rather than from primary sources, so treat them as characterized positions. Their structure still matters. Sacks argues that safety work needs no waiver at all, which implies the conversation reading is a solution to a non-problem. Khan argues that existing law already governs the conduct, which implies the output-agreement reading would be an exemption dressed as a clarification. Both objections land somewhere on the spectrum the essay left undefined. Neither can be answered without fixing the point first.

Numbers Written Into Rules Decay

Tunguz supplies the most useful piece of engineering evidence in the whole exchange, and it has nothing to do with waivers. The 2023 US executive order required reporting for models trained above 10^26 FLOPS. While that rule stood, “No model had crossed that line.” Training compute, meanwhile, “grows about fivefold a year.” His conclusion is the sentence anyone who writes thresholds should keep on a wall: “A fixed number is a ceiling the floor reaches on its own.”

Put the two decay rates next to each other. Compute rising roughly fivefold a year, price of intelligence halving on the order of every 46 days. Any rule that names a number without naming the mechanism that updates it has a shelf life measured against curves like those, not against legislative calendars. That is the same structural risk we described when a model’s availability changes underneath a system that depends on it: the artifact moves, the governing text does not.

Designations Outlive the Reason They Were Created

Gomez’s second contribution is historical and it is the argument least likely to be answered.

In 1975 the SEC designated three bond-rating firms and, in his account, “never published criteria for how anyone else might earn the designation.” Twenty-five years later there were still only three. The 1985 Motor Vehicle Block Exemption in Europe took the European Commission “roughly twenty five years of reforms to unwind.”

In my reading the two cases share a shape. A regulator grants a defined set of firms a legal position that competitors cannot enter, and the entry criteria either go unwritten or go unrevised. The position then outlasts the conditions that justified it by a generation. Applied to frontier AI, the test that matters is whether the instrument carries a written path in and a written path out. Nothing in the passages under debate describes either.

Do This Now: Define the Term by the Observable

Most readers of this debate will never negotiate an antitrust waiver. If you are writing an AI policy this quarter that borrows its vocabulary, the ambiguity travels with the words.

Take every governance term in your current policy and write the observable next to it. “Pacing,” “responsible scaling,” “human oversight,” “material change,” “high-risk use.” For each one, name the thing an auditor could point at: a document, a log line, a signature, a measured value with a unit. A term that survives this exercise is a control. A term that cannot produce an observable is a sentiment, and it will be read differently by your legal team and your regulator, exactly as “narrow waiver” was read differently by an author and his critics inside the same week.

Then check every number in the policy for a review trigger. Any fixed threshold needs the clause that updates it, tied to an observable rate rather than a calendar. Tunguz’s line is the test. If the floor rises fivefold a year and your ceiling is a constant, the rule expires on its own without anyone deciding to retire it.

Finally, write the exit. For any internal designation that grants a team or a vendor special standing, write the criteria for entering and the conditions that end it, on the same page, before the first designation is made. Twenty-five years is what the record says it costs to add that clause afterwards. Brazil’s PL 2338 makes a statutory regime the forcing function, and we have walked through what it demands of engineering teams rather than of lawyers.

The pacing debate will be settled by governments, slowly. The definitional discipline it exposed is available to any organization on Monday morning, and it costs nothing but the hour it takes to read your own policy with an auditor’s eye.

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This analysis synthesizes We Must Pace the Frontier (Dario Amodei, Anthropic, September 2026), Who Gets to Define the Rules for AI? (Aidan Gomez, Cohere, September 2026), Frontier labs have a financial incentive to pace the frontier (Cogito Ergo Sum, September 2026), and What Does Pacing Mean? (Tomasz Tunguz, September 2026).

Victorino Group helps engineering organizations turn AI governance terms into observables an auditor can check. Let’s talk.