Navigating the Geopolitical and Technological Frontiers of Antitrust

Compass Lexecon experts helped shape the discussion on two major forces currently disrupting antitrust: shifting geopolitics in global merger control and the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), at the 2026 American Bar Association International Law Section Annual Conference in Washington D.C. Convening with leading practitioners and experts on global antitrust matters, Dr. Vanessa Yanhua Zhang discussed geopolitics and global mergers, while Professor Ginger Jin and Dr. Alexander White discussed the influence of AI.

Revisiting Global Merger Control Amid Shifting Geopolitical Landscapes

Dr. Zhang examined how geopolitical currents are rewriting the rules of cross-border merger reviews on her panel moderated by Cunzhen Huang (Cleary Gottlieb), that included Ilene Knable Gotts (Wachtell Lipton), Professor Aurelien Portuese (George Washington University), Calvin Goldman (The Law Office of Calvin Goldman, K.C.), and Claire Thomas-Daoulas (Brunswick Group).

The discussion highlighted a paradigm shift: global merger control is no longer an exercise focused solely on consumer welfare. Instead, merger enforcement is caught between a "Neo-Brandeisian" push from the left and a "National Security" drive from the right, resulting in multi-objective reviews. This manifests in the growing interconnection between antitrust and foreign investment review, and in the gradual broadening of the consumer welfare definition under the EU’s new guidelines.

Dr. Zhang underscored important contours of several Asian jurisdictions, discussing the role of China’s State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR). She noted that SAMR stands out compared to analogous agencies in other jurisdictions. In particular, it explicitly pursues a dual mandate: actively attracting foreign investment while safeguarding national security and supply chain resilience in critical sectors.

More broadly, the panel explored the apparent rise of "competition between competition authorities," where agencies in different jurisdictions reach contradictory conclusions regarding the same global transaction. The different approaches taken by the UK and EU regarding the Microsoft/Activision deal are a noteworthy example of this phenomenon.

The panel highlighted three points for global merger teams to prioritize when navigating the increasingly complex antitrust and geopolitical environment:

• Be proactive in mapping the regulatory landscape by locality and engage early with all relevant authorities across jurisdictions.
• Synchronize traditional antitrust analysis with foreign investment/national security reviews. Modern transactions run on two parallel tracks, but clients often anticipate a deal being cleared despite each track’s associated risks.
• Engage economic advisors across a wider range of matters beyond traditional antitrust to analyze economic and supply-chain resilience effects at a larger scale.

AI and the Future of Competition, Regulation, Intellectual Property, and Enforcement

Dr. White moderated a panel on the legal and economic frontier of AI that included Professor Jin, as well as Logan Breed (Hogan Lovells Cadwalader), Alexander Brown (Alston & Bird), and Laura Onken (Axinn).

The session focused on ways that AI blurs the traditional notion of decision-maker autonomy that underpins legal and economic systems. It highlighted common threads running through competition, regulation, IP, and enforcement, related to this blurring and sought to understand the implications.

Key examples discussed included:

• The growth of agentic AI systems designed to act on behalf of individuals, corporations, or agencies that may set prices and/or negotiate with one another.
• The rise of innovation or content creation done, in some proportion, by a mix of humans and AI.
• The phenomenon of mergers where the intent of the transaction does not appear to fit a standard template (such as so-called “acquihires”), and thus it becomes unclear what the appropriate standards should be for review.

To set the stage, Dr. White reminded the audience of Amara’s Law, namely the tendency to overestimate a technology’s short run effects and underestimate its effects in the long run. Building on this perspective, the panel considered a taxonomy of different levels of current and prospective AI technologies, ranging from those that do routine tasks to more advanced, quickly approaching ones that could be described as “self-aware.”

The panel highlighted challenges that are rapidly leaving the realm of science fiction and entering everyday life. In particular, the discussion focused on the notion of mens rea (“guilty mind”), which is fundamental to traditional criminal liability. Panelists addressed how this notion could be practically applied to AI‑driven conduct. For example, cartel and conspiracy laws typically treat specific intent as a necessary element, yet AI systems may operate in highly sophisticated ways that are independent of any human intent. How should the law be designed to prohibit the underlying undesirable behavior without provoking unintended consequences? From a compliance standpoint, firms already bear a due‑diligence obligation to understand how the AI tools they deploy actually function, since even inadvertent use can create legal and regulatory risk.

Picking up one of the panel’s recurring threads regarding the growing mix of human- and AI-created content, Professor Jin brought empirical evidence to bear, based on her recent research on the economic effects of generative AI on creators’ incentives. She framed the central theme as whether AI-generated content substitutes for or complements human-created content. The evidence she described points toward substitution. For instance, traffic to original content sites has declined, and while the volume of new eBooks has tripled, the quality of new releases has declined, which may indicate a market failure that warrants policy attention. Professor Jin also discussed enforcement, drawing on her research into scenarios where regulators deploy AI to improve monitoring while firms use AI to redesign harmful practices to evade detection. She further argued that agencies cannot afford a reactive posture and instead should invest in AI capabilities early enough to stay ahead of the firms they oversee.