Today on Decoder , we’ve got the first of a two-part series on the future of business, and I’m talking with Jonathan Kanter, the former antitrust chief for the US Department of Justice in the Biden administration. These days, he’s both a professor of law at WashU and professor of technology policy at Carnegie Mellon.

The biggest story in tech right now is the spiraling debate about AI safety and regulation . Researchers at the big AI labs including Anthropic and Google DeepMind have quit in noisy ways, saying the models pose real threats and safety isn’t being taken seriously across the industry. Other researchers have said the chance of AI killing us all is greater than 10 percent, and the CEOs of all these companies have issued various calls to slow down development and develop regulation, including asking for antitrust exemptions so they can all coordinate on safety issues.

That is a lot of ideas, and I am especially curious about the antitrust piece, which has led to accusations that these companies are seeking regulatory capture, attempting to form a cartel, and even somehow finding a way out from investor pressure ahead of their IPOs. 

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So to make sense of it all, I called Jonathan Kanter. 

Jonathan brought huge antitrust cases against Google, Apple, and Ticketmaster during his time as antitrust chief, and along with Lina Khan, led what amounted to a full reboot of American antitrust policy. As you’ll hear him say, he won those cases against Google and Ticketmaster, and that case against Apple is still live in the Trump DOJ, surprising many. 

That reboot has also led to some surprising alliances in the AI debate — avowed libertarian and former Trump AI czar David Sacks has been approvingly retweeting Lina Khan saying there’s no need for an antitrust exemption.

This is all a lot, and you’ll hear Jonathan and me really get into the weeds of how all this regulation might work, and how it might interact with antitrust law, competition policy, and our relationship with China.