Zvi Mowshowitz and the Antitrust Safety Waiver [Operational Drift]

About this episode

This investigation follows the quiet shift in AI governance where competition law is framed as a barrier to safety. We examine the proposal for antitrust waivers that would allow frontier labs to coordinate deployment thresholds and model releases. The episode explores how this 'safety coordination' could lead to regulatory capture, effectively allowing incumbent labs to entrench their market positions under the guise of responsible stewardship. Margaret Ellis traces the records from early two thousand twenty-four through the development of national security memoranda to reveal how accountability is being relocated from open markets to opaque, high-level agreements.