FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson told a Georgetown audience Tuesday that “everyone should be deeply suspicious” of AI labs asking Washington for new safety rules and antitrust cover in the same breath. The line is a direct public reply to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who had proposed a narrow antitrust waiver Friday so leading labs could coordinate an AI slowdown.

“If companies are simultaneously coming to Washington and asking for a host of regulations and an antitrust exemption, all of my alarm bells go off,” Ferguson said, per Reuters. He framed the risk as incumbents seeking to “insulate their incumbency from challenge.”

The same day, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told the House Financial Services Committee that a liability exemption is a nonstarter. “The best way to guarantee safety is that the creators are liable for what they build and generate,” Bessent said.

Industry didn’t close ranks. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called the waiver push “completely unnecessary” on CNBC’s Mad Money, arguing existing product-safety law already applies. OpenAI’s Chris Lehane said the company has coordinated with Anthropic and Google on safety for several weeks without a waiver, per Bloomberg.

For owner-operators of small businesses, the read-through is concrete. The FTC is publicly defending the open challenger market they actually shop in for AI. At the same time, its post-comment AI accuracy rule and its posture on AI accuracy claims under Section 5, alongside guidance treating undisclosed AI pricing as deception, keep the capability-claims burden on whoever operates the tool. Done-for-you services such as LemonLime operate in that challenger space; when the provider prepares output and the owner approves each send, the owner isn’t the party making capability claims about an AI tool.

The House leaves Washington Thursday with the FRONTIER Act and the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act stalled. The regulate-and-shield pitch lost its week before the legislative vehicle ever moved.

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Sources