Former FTC Commissioner Urges Skepticism Toward AI Doom Warnings

Alvaro Bedoya, who previously served as a US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) commissioner, has pushed back against the surge of AI extinction warnings from major labs.

Bedoya was on the commission from 2022 until he was controversially removed in 2025. His remarks come amid a heated public debate about the pace of AI development.

Humanity Has Survived Worse

Bedoya points out that human history includes far more severe challenges.

“AI will not eradicate humanity. Humans survived an ice age, the Black Death, two world wars, and (so far) the advent of nuclear weapons. Anyone who is loudly warning of AI-caused human extinction should not be taken seriously,” he said.

He does not consider himself an advocate for AI, nor does he claim the technology is entirely safe. Instead, he targets the use of extinction rhetoric, which he describes as a strawman used to justify a cartel of billionaire AI companies.

He proposes a sincerity test: anyone who genuinely believed a product could wipe out humanity would stop operations immediately and notify authorities.

A 2014 Memo Already Answered This

Anthropic's chief Dario Amodei requested a narrow antitrust waiver from Washington so labs could hold safety discussions. This request is part of the second of three steps in a pacing plan that Sam Altman endorsed last week, and Elon Musk also supports the idea.

Bedoya argues such a request was unnecessary. He references a joint policy statement from the Justice Department and the FTC, issued on April 10, 2014, which stated that antitrust should not impede legitimate cybersecurity information sharing.

“I am, rather, explaining that the companies have, right now and yesterday, the ability to coordinate to stop any safety and health risks. Antitrust is no barrier to that,” Bedoya wrote on X.

He explains that safety coordination is legal, but coordination designed to shut out cheaper competitors is not.

He connects that risk to the economic situation. Major labs are spending heavily without achieving profitability, and open weight models offer lower prices, which undercuts them.

“The panic of individual employees may be sincere if misguided, but the moves by their CEOs to achieve some kind of broad antitrust waiver or exemption should be meet with deep skepticism in light of the economics of the industry and the threat they face from open models,” he added.

Altman has arrived at a similar conclusion from the other direction. In a longer X post, he said OpenAI does not believe it must wait for an antitrust exemption or legislation before beginning its work.

He still wants a federal framework that sets consistent safety rules for frontier labs, and he notes that international coordination is where government help is most needed.

That skepticism contrasts with a week of warnings from within the labs themselves. The debate dates back to September 9, when Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon quit. Lawmakers began advocating for a superintelligence ban. Bridgewater's investment chief Greg Jensen has also warned that things will stay the same until AI kills someone.