AI firms’ co-ordinated slowdown amounts to ‘cartel’ behaviour, Cohere CEO says

Cohere Inc. chief executive Aidan Gomez is criticizing calls from top leaders in artificial intelligence to slow the pace of development, writing that the proposed approach will entrench power with a Silicon Valley “cartel” and that companies are using “fear under the pretext of protecting the public.”

Mr. Gomez, who co-founded the Toronto-based AI company in 2019, wrote in an essay published Sunday that there is a risk of tech giants authoring rules around safety and development without broader input. “If this is the most consequential technology in human history, then the rules for it cannot be written by a small group of commercially aligned companies,” he wrote.

An intensified debate about how to rein in powerful AI systems was kicked off by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who argued in his own essay published Saturday that frontier labs need to slow the pace of development to give risk prevention strategies time to keep up. “I believe that if slowing down bought us even an extra year or two before models reach critical levels of capability,” he wrote, “we could greatly reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong.”

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Mr. Amodei said two developments shaped his thinking recently. One is a concept called recursive self-improvement, which refers to the ability of AI to build a more capable AI system, potentially exceeding our ability to keep it in check. He also referred to the recent cybersecurity incident where AI agents powered by OpenAI’s technology hacked another company as part of a test, unbeknownst to OpenAI.

Among Mr. Amodei’s proposals are for third-party safety evaluators to embed with AI labs, and for companies in democratic countries to establish standards and limits on the rate of progress. He noted that the U.S. government may have to provide an antitrust waiver to allow for co-ordination.

The idea of slowing development was supported by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and by SpaceXAI founder Elon Musk.

Mr. Gomez at Cohere, which competes with the AI giants, wrote that he supported independent reviews of powerful models, but rejected other parts of Mr. Amodei’s proposals. “The firms drafting the framework are the firms sitting at the top of the market today,” he wrote. “A mechanism that slows everyone down while explicitly preserving existing commercial advantage does not make AI safer. It risks entrenching today’s dominant AI companies.”

Instead, he proposed a co-ordinated international effort to develop a framework around AI harms, identifying which risks are of concern, and setting thresholds for when governments should get involved. He also called for more transparency, particularly when serious incidents occur, and for independent testing of models around capabilities that have been identified as dangerous.

Such testing must be truly independent, similar to how financial institutions are licensed. He argued that Mr. Amodei’s proposal involves “handpicked” auditors, which could lead to regulatory capture.

As for the OpenAI hack, Mr. Gomez wrote that none of Mr. Amodei’s proposals likely would have prevented it. “What failed was the quality of the instructions, and the strength of the walls around the test, and how long agents were allowed to continue working without observation,” he wrote.

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Alvaro Bedoya, former head of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, wrote on X that antitrust law does not prevent AI companies from working together to improve safety, but it does prevent them from organizing to forestall upstarts. “Moves by their CEOs to achieve some kind of broad ‘antitrust waiver’ or ‘exemption’ should be met with deep skepticism in light of the economics of the industry and the threat they face from open models,” he wrote.

A co-ordinated slowdown could prove difficult, in any event. U.S. President Donald Trump seemed to resist such calls when asked by reporters over the weekend, saying he wants to maintain America’s lead over China.

China’s Global Times newspaper, meanwhile, said in an editorial Sunday that the plan amounts to a “silent AI cold war” designed to curb the country’s AI development. Chinese companies such as DeepSeek and Z.ai have been releasing more powerful open-weight AI models that are free to modify, which could threaten the dominance of U.S. tech.