前美国反垄断司司长 Jonathan Kanter 创办 FluxCap，用 AI 帮原告挑战科技巨头

When Jonathan Kanter stepped down as head of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division in 2024, he set out to keep fighting to dismantle illegal monopolies. But this time, he’s continuing the fight in the private sector, and with a perhaps unexpected tool: AI.

Alongside former acting Antitrust Division chief Doha Mekki, Kanter recently launched a new tech startup, FluxCap. The team is stacked with former DOJ staffers and former Palantir engineers, and it’s selling an AI-based legal research and analysis tool that helps plaintiffs build and strengthen cases against the kinds of well-heeled companies Kanter and Mekki took on at the Antitrust Division. FluxCap is launching with a focus on antitrust cases, but it plans to expand into other practice areas as well.

Kanter imagines FluxCap as a “force multiplier” for antitrust watchdogs taking on powerful opponents in Big Tech and elsewhere.

“This, to me, it’s existential”

“This, to me, it’s existential,” he tells The Verge in an interview. “Because it’s the only way that enforcement is going to work in the long term, is if technology and other tools are able to help scarce resources go significantly further than they can today.”

FluxCap’s platform, built off proprietary technology and existing large language models, is primarily intended for research and analysis. It’s trained to pick up the facts and legal framework that will determine whether a case succeeds, then find potential holes in attorneys’ logic. To help attorneys prepare for trial, FluxCap can also help sift through vast piles of discovery materials, searching for signals that a company acted in anticompetitive ways. It’s part of a wave of legal tech tools that are using AI to try to help lawyers do more with less and make the legal process more efficient.

Getting the tool to find relevant evidence was one of the hardest parts, Kanter says. Executives are unlikely to come out and say they’re monopolists, but surrounding context can give a very specific meaning to certain messages. In the antitrust trial against Live Nation-Ticketmaster, for example, the government played a recorded phone call between the Live Nation CEO and a customer who decided to switch to a different ticketing platform. In response, the CEO reminded the customer that a new arena in town could make it harder to deliver as many concerts to his venue. The customer testified he took it as a “not-so-veiled” threat that Live Nation could cut off events programming if he didn’t also accept its ticketing service.

FluxCap’s team of former government lawyers spent months testing the system with existing and hypothetical test cases to see if it could really help build a solid argument. Getting “basic legal tools” (which Kanter calls “BLTs”) to understand that kind of nuance is difficult because “lawyering isn’t about right or wrong answers,” he says. “Both sides can be right and both sides can be wrong. And what you’re essentially trying to do is you’re trying to persuade a court, a jury, a regulator to reach a certain outcome.”

The team counts antitrust boutique firm Kressin Powers as one of its first customers, and Kanter says it’s in talks with both public and private enforcers. “It gives them that virtual capacity so that a small team can take on a large team,” Kanter says, adding that it provides the manpower of roughly “20-plus people working around the clock.”

The seeds of FluxCap began inside the Antitrust Division, where Kanter and his team were already trying to stretch their limited resources with technology. During the Biden administration, the DOJ went to trial against Google twice and brought monopolization suits against Apple and Live Nation, among other actions. But the Division’s resources and staff pale in comparison to companies with multibillion- to trillion-dollar market caps and large legal teams to review documents and mount defenses. The entire Antitrust Division was appropriated $245 million by Congress for fiscal year 2026, with more than 400 attorneys on staff across several issue areas.

“It’s just not realistic to have the resources necessary to take on these big companies”

The imbalance is even greater for state attorneys general, who have pushed forward with antitrust action as the Trump administration has hung back. Earlier this year, state AGs won a case against Live Nation that the DOJ under the Trump administration settled, and states also sued to block the Paramount-Warner Media merger before ultimately settling, when the DOJ declined. “A large state AG might have 10 people working on a case,” Kanter says. “It’s just not realistic to have the resources necessary to take on these big companies.”

During Kanter’s time as antitrust head, he and others tried AI-based BLTs but found them lacking for complex legal research. “Every antitrust lawyer has tried asking questions to ChatGPT or [AI legal research software] Harvey or one of those tools, and they do okay,” Kanter says. “But they miss the nuance.” While Kanter was at the DOJ, the Antitrust Division secured a $45.5 million grant from the government’s Tech Modernization Fund to implement better tools for managing cases and reviewing evidence. Kanter says his team “never had the opportunity to put that to work” before leaving office, but what they’re building now is “even more ambitious and better than I could have imagined when I was at DOJ.”

Tech alone can’t fully even the playing field, Kanter says. “Government is always going to be outmatched, and they desperately need more funding, and desperately need more budget, and more headcount.” Even if that happens, however, private defendants are likely to “far outweigh anything that the government could ever produce, whether it’s federal government or states or private plaintiffs,” he says. “We believe this will be the great equalizer that will allow those teams to go toe to toe with anyone regardless of their size and regardless how deep their pockets are.”

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• Lauren Feiner