U.S. Deputy Attorney General Stanley Woodward said the Trump administration is considering whether to update interagency antitrust guidance on cybersecurity to address a new wave of threats posed by artificial intelligence.
At an event in New York on September 17, Woodward said existing guidance clarifies the extent to which companies can coordinate hacking risks without violating rules prohibiting anti-competitive behavior. While Silicon Valley leaders have called in recent days for exemptions from antitrust scrutiny so they can work together on security issues, Woodward said so far no one has contacted his office about the matter.
“If anyone at any of the cutting-edge labs wanted to come to us with a problem, they would get a meeting,” said Woodward, the department’s No. 3 official and head of its antitrust division. “That meeting has not been requested.”
During the Obama administration, the federal government issued guidance clarifying that companies could coordinate the sharing of cybersecurity threat information to better protect networks and thwart attacks. The tech industry has proposed similar approaches to artificial intelligence.
Concerns about the risks of artificial intelligence have increased since a report was published on Saturday prose Anthropic PBC CEO Dario Amodei warned of new threats posed by the technology. Amodei pledged to slow the development of cutting-edge models and said the industry would benefit from narrow antitrust exemptions that allow AI companies to collaborate more on safety issues.
While Woodward expressed a willingness to discuss the industry’s concerns, the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, which oversees competition enforcement, expressed skepticism about companies’ desire to seek exemptions.
Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson said on Tuesday he would be “deeply skeptical” of requests for relief and said artificial intelligence companies are “demanding barriers to entry” to protect their companies from challengers.
Some of the nation’s leading AI developers have already begun security discussions. Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s head of global policy, said on Tuesday that the company has been working with Anthropic and Alphabet Inc.’s Google DeepMind for weeks on artificial intelligence risks. He added that there was plenty of precedent for their work on safety, citing the aviation industry as an example. “Over time, in many cases, companies have tried to help each other on safety issues,” he said.
Appearing on Thursday, Woodward said the government was looking at the issue “very closely” but was still waiting to hear from industry.
So far, he said, officials “have not received any outreach from the company.”
Copyright 2026 Bloomberg.
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