Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s global policy chief, told reporters on Tuesday that the company has held weeks-long discussions with rivals Anthropic and Google DeepMind about AI safety. Lehane said he is in Washington to work with lawmakers on addressing catastrophic risks associated with artificial intelligence. His comments corroborate earlier reporting that these firms have been in contact.
What prompted the coordination
The public discussion intensified after an essay published Saturday by Dario Amodei, chief executive officer of Anthropic, which urged industry players to cooperate to slow the development of frontier AI and reduce the chance of catastrophic outcomes. Several industry leaders, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Google’s Demis Hassabis, and SpaceXAI’s Elon Musk, publicly supported Amodei’s call.
Sam Altman also indicated that OpenAI would join efforts to embed third‑party evaluators into companies to monitor model safety, aligning with the push for independent oversight.
Legal and regulatory concerns
Lehane acknowledged that the three companies have been talking for several weeks. Some observers, including Sam Altman, have warned these conversations could raise antitrust concerns if coordination were used to suppress competition. Amodei’s essay proposed a narrow government waiver that would permit safety coordination among firms without antitrust liability; according to reports Lehane said the companies do not need such a waiver.
Earlier signals and a standards body plan
The remarks confirm previous hints that private discussions took place. In a recent interview with Fortune, Sam Altman suggested he had been in private talks with other AI leaders. The Information reported this week that OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind have been working on creating a standards body for the AI industry — a mechanism Altman reportedly told staff would have to be built without U.S. government backing.
In July, Demis Hassabis called on the U.S. to establish a new standards body to act as an AI watchdog with the authority to vet the world’s most advanced models and to coordinate industry-wide slowdowns if risks escalated.
Political pushback
The issue has also drawn political pushback. President Donald Trump has dismissed safety concerns as a "hoax" and opposed tighter regulation, arguing a slowdown would advantage China in the AI race. David Sacks, a senior AI adviser to Trump and a long-time investor with personal stakes in the industry, similarly said worries about existential risk from AI are overblown.
Support for independent verification in legislation
At the same Tuesday meeting, Lehane said OpenAI supports a provision in the FRONTIER Act that would require top frontier labs to admit "independent verification organizations" into their operations to ensure models are developed safely.
Outreach for comment
TechCrunch contacted Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI for comment. No public responses were reported at the time of publication.
In sum: the confirmation that OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind have been in weeks-long talks underscores ongoing industry efforts to coordinate on AI safety, even as antitrust, legislative and political debates shape how such coordination might be structured and enforced.
