Biden and his bureaucrats should step out of the way and let AI continue to flourish.
Swinging the antitrust sledgehammer down on AI would bring this innovation to a screeching halt
I n the hit World War II miniseries Band of Brothers, First Lieutenant Herbert Sobel would famously look for any slight infraction to punish his soldiers. If an infraction did not exist, Sobel would invent one.
The Biden administration’s new probe into Microsoft, OpenAI, and Nvidia for potential antitrust violations in the artificial-intelligence space represents the Sobel-ization of antitrust law. If successful, the administration’s antitrust crusade threatens to kill some of the most exciting technological innovation in a generation.
Under a new agreement between Biden’s antitrust agencies, the Federal Trade Commission will probe OpenAI and Microsoft, and the Department of Justice Antitrust Division will probe Nvidia. The New York Times reports that the agencies, headed by Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter respectively, will investigate the “dominant roles” that these companies play in the “artificial intelligence industry.”
Now is not the time for an antitrust crackdown on AI, a space that is rife with intense competition and innovation in both software and hardware. Since OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot launched in November 2022, technology companies have competed aggressively to accelerate AI development. Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Meta all have their own AI tools, with new features being rolled out on a seemingly daily basis.
Progressives have demonized these companies for investing in AI, painting them as greedy monopolists harnessing AI’s potential to entrench their dominance. The truth is far less sinister: Each company wants your business and therefore will innovate aggressively to ensure that it offers the best products possible. Large technology companies have led the way in AI investment because they have the resources, scale, and expertise to do so.
Competition is similarly aggressive on the hardware side. Nvidia optimized its chips, originally designed for video games, to train AI models. Shareholders and investors have richly rewarded Nvidia’s innovation, recently powering the company to a market capitalization well over $3 trillion. Not to be outdone, rivals like Qualcomm and Intel are developing chips to compete with Nvidia, alongside similar efforts from Amazon and Google.
This intense competition benefits consumers in ways we can already see, as well as ways that remain to be seen. For example, AI has already driven massive improvements in health outcomes for Americans, as AI expert Adam Thierer has written. AI-powered brain and spine implants helped a man who was paralyzed for more than a decade walk again. Similarly, doctors use AI to help detect and treat cancer, and AI could very likely accelerate the discovery of a cancer cure.
Swinging the antitrust sledgehammer down on AI would bring this innovation to a screeching halt. Bureaucrats do not have a crystal ball to see how the AI industry is going to look next month, let alone years from now. Government overregulation will discourage future AI innovation and put us behind communist China in the AI race.
Kanter and Khan have moved antitrust enforcement toward a “big is bad” approach that targets companies based on their size. This approach, unmoored from the rule of law and any rational economic framework, allows bureaucrats to pick economic winners and losers. The AI crackdown is a continuation of this pattern, which has so far failed in court.
Khan in particular has discussed using the AI boom as an opportunity to grow government power over the economy. In February, Khan said that the FTC’s goal was to spot “potential problems at the inception rather than years and years later, when problems are deeply baked in and much more difficult to rectify.”
The FTC and DOJ are law-enforcement agencies, not regulators. They are supposed to prosecute violations of the law, not go on fishing expeditions looking for trouble just because they dislike the way an industry is structured. Instead, the FTC and DOJ are targeting certain companies and desperately looking for some way to bring a case against them, instead of following the evidence of actual harm regardless of the identity of the subject of investigation.
By putting the cart before the horse in this fashion, the antitrust agencies turn what should be law enforcement into a quasi-regulatory effort to reshape an industry to benefit government-backed players. Like First Lieutenant Sobel, Biden bureaucrats are picking targets and then inventing demerits to cut them down to size. This regulatory activism is squarely outside of the FTC and DOJ’s remit, and will harm innovation and consumers.
Instead of looking to Sobel as a model of antitrust enforcement, Biden and his bureaucrats should step out of the way and let AI continue to flourish.