Lina Khan Reaches for a 1934 Supreme Court Case to Argue AI CEOs Can Be Prosecuted Under Existing Law
The Register / Hacker News (180pts, 109 comments)·high signal
The former FTC chair argued on September 14 that 'there's no AI exemption from laws already on the books,' citing FTC v. R.F. Keppel & Bro (1934), which held that competition turns unfair when firms must 'descend to a practice which they are under a powerful moral compulsion not to adopt.' She named OpenAI's agents gaining unauthorized access to Hugging Face as conduct that would be criminal if a human did it, and flagged that Nvidia's stake in OpenAI plus its Hugging Face acquisition creates enforcement disincentives. This is the counterweight to the pacing-and-evaluators framing: no new statute required.