The essay
Cohere co-founder and chief executive Aidan Gomez published an essay on 13 September arguing that the standards body the largest US labs are discussing would function as a cartel, and that the antitrust waiver it would require is the tell.
His framing is deliberately narrow. He is not arguing against regulation. In his words, AI needs guardrails, and that is not the dispute and never has been — the dispute is over who writes them, who gets to participate and whose interests the rules protect.
What he is objecting to
The plan Gomez is answering began with a proposal from Google DeepMind chair Demis Hassabis in July for a self-regulatory organisation modelled on FINRA, the body that oversees US brokers, to test the most capable systems before release. OpenAI confirmed on 15 September that it had been working with Anthropic and Google on the idea for weeks.
Gomez names Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei’s published roadmap, which asks governments for antitrust waivers so that labs can coordinate. His argument is that a handful of labs in one country agreeing shared standards, with a legal exemption allowing them to coordinate on development speed, is the arrangement competition law exists to prevent — and he draws the comparison to regulatory capture in finance and the car industry.
His alternative
The essay sets out four pillars. First, an evidence-based risk framework: published, internationally coordinated standards naming specific harms and capabilities that warrant oversight. Second, mandatory transparency on how models are built, what they can do, what the risks are and how they are mitigated, with incident reporting attached. Third, testing scoped by evidence — independent evaluation aimed at genuinely dangerous capabilities such as cyberattacks and threats to critical infrastructure, rather than blanket compliance. Fourth, assurance carried out by genuinely independent verifiers, on the aviation and financial model, with more than one party and published criteria.
Much of that overlaps with what the labs themselves say they want. The disagreement is about who holds the pen and whether the arrangement needs an exemption from competition law to work.
Where Cohere sits
Gomez is not a neutral observer. Cohere is a Canadian company, outside the group doing the talking, and a standards body designed by the three largest US labs would set terms it would have to meet without having helped write them. It is also in the middle of a merger with Aleph Alpha and in talks to raise as much as $3bn, which makes the sovereignty argument commercially useful to it.
That does not make the antitrust point wrong. It does mean the essay is a competitor’s brief as well as a policy argument.
What to watch
Whether any government responds to the waiver request, and whether labs outside the three — Mistral, Cohere, the Chinese labs, the open-weight community — are offered seats. A standards body that only its authors can join is a different institution from one that sets rules for everybody.
