What is FTC?

Structuring AI deals as non-exclusive licensing agreements avoids automatic FTC review and cannot be blocked the way traditional M&A can.

“By structuring the deals as non-exclusive licensing agreements, they don't trigger automatic review by the FTC and can't be blocked in the same way as traditional mergers and acquisitions.”

The FTC's Cambridge Analytica enforcement order was not a negotiated settlement but a summary judgment, making it an outlier in FTC algorithmic enforcement because the firm was already defunct when the order issued.

“Cambridge Analytica is actually a bit of an outlier because by the time that all of this all of the FTC's order came through Cambridge Analytica was defunct. So Cambridge was actually a summary judgment as opposed to a settlement.”

Lina Khan's FTC effectively froze M&A for four years, with corporate development teams explicitly told to stand down, a market-distorting effect that is now reversing.

“4 years of no acquisitions. I people I talked to who were in corporate development were like, we've been told to stand down.”

An FTC-blocked biotech acquisition resulted in a drug never being developed; 50 people die per year as a consequence, per an anecdote Browder relays.

“The worst kind of Lena Khan story I heard is there's like a biotech company that was being acquired by a much larger kind of pharmaceutical company and Lena Khan's FDC blocked the acquisition and to this day and the drug didn't get developed and to this day 50 people die a year because of the acquisition being blocked.”