DOJ Antitrust Chief Wary of Looser Rules for AI

Newly confirmed head of the antitrust division of the Department of Justice, Gail Slater, called out big tech companies Wednesday for seeking to challenge enforcement of competition laws in the realm of artificial intelligence (AI) on national security grounds.

“The current technology race is AI. So, we’re hearing certain platform companies, but also tech companies beyond platform companies too, talk about the ways in which they need the U.S. government to support them because they are de facto, quasi national champions,” in that race, she said. “And that comes into the antitrust space as a defense – it’s not a defense in the antitrust laws but it’s a defense that’s being made – the argument is, we’re really, really important to national security therefore you should not be applying the antitrust laws to us at this particular moment in time. And if you push it out to its logical extension, it’s almost like an argument for a de facto exemption from the antitrust laws.”

The assistant attorney general wasn’t buying it, however.

“They way I think about it is, we’re free market republicans,” she said, speaking at the Little Tech Competition Summit in Washington. “We want free markets to thrive. And a very important component of that is healthy competition. We don’t want an economy of monopolies and oligopolies. We want startups to thrive, to be able to enter these markets and compete. And antitrust is a really important backstop on that.”

Related: DOJ Drops Google AI Divestment Plan but Pushes Forward in Antitrust Battle

She also dismissed the tech companies’ argument as historically flawed.

“We have historic precedent that we can do both things,” she said. “We can both defend our national security and we can enforce the antitrust laws. During the second world war we continued enforcing the antitrust laws, and we had considerable foes then.”

She noted AT&T made a similar argument in the 1980s that also failed. “AT&T made an argument that, if they were broken up, that would undermine national security because we needed AT&T to stay a monopoly so we could fight the cold war effectively,” she said. “The justice department moved forward. They broke up AT&T and guess what happened? A lot of innovation was unleashed. We got the wireless industry out of that breakup.”

Although Slater drew support from both sides of the aisle during her confirmation hearing, ultimately receiving 78 votes in the Senate, the Trump Administration has generally been supportive of U.S. tech companies’ efforts to push back against aggressive antitrust enforcement measures, particularly in the European Union. Just hours after Slater spoke, in fact, Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg stood alongside Donald Trump as the president unveiled sweeping new tariffs on countries around the work, including the EU, which was hit with a 20% levy on all imports into the U.S.

One area where Slater did indicate the department could take a lighter approach than under the previous administration was in mergers.

“I’m more open to consent decrees in merger cases,” she said. “Jonathan Kantar [her predecessor] was not a proponent of that. But, to use a technical term that only antitrust lawyers will understand, that doesn’t mean I’m open to what I called ‘bullshit consent decrees.’”