OpenAI, Anthropic Safety Talks Stir Startup Concerns

0:00 Natasha Mascarenhas and Maggie Eastland join us now. So, Natasha, I'm gonna go to you first. You have done what you always do, which is go out to industry and say, what do you guys think about what's going on here? Right? If you think about Anthropic and OpenAI in private markets, let's say Meta in in the public markets, there are lots of investors that are bracing for what this net results in. Right? Absolutely. I mean, I spoke to over a dozen founders in the first forty eight hours since Dario posted his call for AI pacing. And I would say the headline is we are worried about a regulatory wall emerging here. We are worried that the bigger companies are going to set rules that us, smaller rivals, are going to have to follow. So there is a lot of fear, I would say, the investor side, a little bit more optimistic Yes. Of, as per usual of, you know, let's keep moving, but everything is fine. No chilling effect here. You know, maybe keep your fundraising dollars a little closer to heart in case you need to work on your own models instead of relying on the other one.

0:57 Okay. The US government's really important here. Maggie Eastland out in Washington DC. Bring us the reporting so we know there's been some contact between anthropic and US officials at least. Yes. And we know that going into that meeting, Howard Lutnick, commerce secretary, as well as Emil Michael, were both eager to push back on anthropic about this idea, all of this doom that has been spreading and has kind of burst onto the public scene. You saw president Trump post, you know, really just a barrage of comments on his true social platform talking about how he did not wanna slow down AI, and, you know, we can definitely bet that that's the message that Tom Brown received on that call that we reported on yesterday.

1:40 Natasha, you know, timing in in the world of of Silicon Valley and venture capital is everything. There's the report out about OpenAI considering private market round pre IPO. You know, is there anything in the reporting that suggests a slowdown or a pacing at the frontier results in reduced activity across the ecosystem, both investment and sort of the activity of founders? I think that will be answered by how successful open a OpenAI is in getting this valuation and in getting an actual round done. I mean, our sources tell us that this is something that investors have approached the company with. And so we don't know exactly where it will land, but I do think it will definitely be a sign of, where energy and activity is.

2:26 Maggie, yesterday, you and I participated in a in a Bloomberg live q and a on on what's happening broadly. And there is this idea let's go back to the David Sachs interview, thirty six hours ago, that actually there are enough pieces of regulation and laws in place that no more government interventions needed. Kinda summarize that camp in this debate. Yeah. So there definitely is one side of the story here that says, look. These AI companies are liable for the products they make. And if they make dangerous products, they're going to be held responsible for that. One interesting twist in this story is that I also reported yesterday yesterday that OpenAI said that it's working with Anthropic and with Google DeepMind already to set safety standards. And they said they actually don't see any need for the government to get involved or to issue any kind of antitrust waiver for the companies to be able to do that.

3:21 Maggie, let's actually get some more specifics on that. So this was Chris Lohoe doing a briefing essentially. Who is Chris Lohoe? And and, like, literally in concrete terms, what is OpenAI agreed to do? Yeah. Chris Lohoe leads global policy for OpenAI, and he spoke to reporters yesterday in Washington. And, specifically, what OpenAI is saying is they've agreed to look into setting safety standards. Now this is, along the terms of what, you know, Denise Pellegrini, Google's, DeepMind's leader, laid out in a proposal that compared this to something like FINRA for the financial industry. So this would be the company is getting together and deciding for themselves, you know, what the standards should be and and potentially even grading each other's models or having independent evaluators do that.

4:09 But right now, it seems that it's still early discussions about this among those three companies. Natasha, there's another party party in your reporting more from Maggie's World, which is the the US Federal Trade Commission chair coming in. What what what what did that part of this debate have to say? I mean, that is the thing that a lot of reps are still trying to figure out if I'm being honest. Like, how seriously do we take this perspective when trying to, you know, decide what the next even, week, month, year looks like, in terms of startup spend and and and how much to to kind of change the way we're pacing our own models.

4:46 They are talking about the the antitrust exemption Yeah. Which you know, Maggie, come back in here real quick. On the antitrust exemption, so this was something that Dario Amin Day had mentioned in his Saturday essay. Right? The antitrust exemption. And that is a particular point that David Sachs in his response was like, absolutely not. Do not ask for that. But could you try and explain what what an antitrust exemption would look like? Why it would be that Anthropic or others would ask for that?

5:15 I think the details of how exactly that would look aren't clear. But, obviously, anytime, you know, companies are coming together and trading information, there there is a risk there. OpenAI and Anthropix seem to differ on this issue, and OpenAI thinks, you know, there's precedent for this. There's things like the airline industry. There's sometimes when sharing safety information is not a competition risk. But in terms of a a waiver, we actually saw yesterday as well FTC chair saying, you know, he'd be deeply suspicious of that. So it seems like the US government is unlikely to issue that, and now OpenAI has put forward this plan that they say they can move ahead without any kind of antitrust exemption.