Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s global policy chief, told reporters on Tuesday that the company has been working with rivals Anthropic and Google DeepMind on AI safety for weeks, as first reported by Bloomberg. Lehane is reportedly in Washington to work with U.S. lawmakers addressing catastrophic risks associated with AI.
The revelation comes in the wake of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s essay, published Saturday, which called for the industry to work together to slow the pace of frontier AI and avoid catastrophic risks. AI leaders across the industry, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Google’s Demis Hassabis, and SpaceXAI’s Elon Musk, supported Amodei’s letter and call to action, with Altman saying that OpenAI would join Anthropic in embedding third-party evaluators into the company to monitor for safety.
On Tuesday, Lehane admitted that the three companies have been in talks for several weeks regarding AI safety. Some, including Altman, have noted that such talks could put the companies at risk of violating antitrust law if the coordination is found to suppress competition. Amodei’s essay proposed a narrow government waiver allowing such safety coordination, but Lehane reportedly said the firms don’t need one.
The news confirms earlier reporting and hints that the companies were working together. In an interview with Fortune late last week, Altman hinted that he had been in private discussions with other AI leaders. This week, The Information reported that the three companies have been working together to create a standards body for the AI industry — something Altman reportedly told staff would need to happen without the support of the U.S. government.
Hassabis called on the U.S. in July to establish a new standards body to act as an AI watchdog, with the power to screen the world’s most advanced models and coordinate industrywide slowdowns if dangers progressed.
President Trump, for his part, has dismissed safety concerns as a hoax and pushed back on the need for tighter regulations, saying any slowdown would give China a leg up in the race. His key AI advisor David Sacks — a longtime investor with a personal stake in much of the industry — echoed this, saying fears of existential risk from AI were overblown.
At the same Tuesday meeting, Lehane said that OpenAI supports a provision in the FRONTIER Act that would force top frontier labs to allow “independent verification organizations” into their companies to ensure models are developed safely.
TechCrunch has reached out to Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI for comment.
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