Sam Altman OpenAI CEO during a speech at Italian Tech Week 2024, located in OGR Turin, Italy, September 26, 2024. Credit: Antonello Marangi / Shutterstock Sam Altman says OpenAI will match Anthropic’s commitment to give independent evaluators employee-like access, a day after Dario Amodei asked the industry to slow down and asked Washington for a narrow antitrust waiver so competitors could coordinate. Europe has no waiver to grant, because Brussels abolished individual exemptions in 2004, and the only soft safe harbour it has since written for competitor standards covers sustainability. OpenAI has said it will match Anthropic’s safety commitment, a day after Dario Amodei asked the industry to slow down. “I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier,” Sam Altman wrote, as Axios reported.
He called independent evaluators with employee-like access a great idea, said OpenAI would do the same, and promised more to share soon. Pacing had been a primary topic of discussion inside OpenAI in recent weeks, he added. Elon Musk, who runs xAI, was briefer. “Dario is right,” he posted. Amodei’s essay on Saturday asked frontier labs to let outside teams verify their safety work from inside their offices.
Anthropic’s own version gives them desks, badges, company laptops and the right to publish what they find. It also asked Washington for something harder. He wants a narrow waiver, so that competitors can hold safety conversations without the conversations themselves becoming the legal problem. Governments need not take part, he wrote, only permit the discussions.
Two of the largest labs have now agreed a common commitment in public, inside a day. That is the first rung of the three-step plan Amodei set out. In Europe there would be nobody to ask. The Commission stopped granting individual exemptions when Regulation 1/2003 took effect in 2004.
Before that, companies notified their agreements to Brussels and waited. Competitors now assess their own against Article 101 and live with the answer. What Europe has instead is a precedent. It rewrote its horizontal cooperation guidelines in 2023, expanding them from 72 pages to 167.
The new text carries a 21-page chapter on sustainability agreements, including a soft safe harbour for standards that meet six conditions. It also reworked the chapters on standardisation and on information exchange between rivals. That is close to the machinery Amodei is asking America to build. Europe has already built it once, for a different public good.
There is no equivalent chapter for safety standards, and nobody has asked for one. His essay does not mention Europe, and neither did Altman’s reply. The Commission’s own tech chief said last week that global rules are needed.
