Jonathan Kanter left the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division in 2024. He did not leave the fight against monopolies. This time he is running it from the private sector, and his main tool is AI.
Kanter launched a startup called FluxCap with Doha Mekki, the former acting chief of the Antitrust Division. The team includes former DOJ staffers and former Palantir engineers. The company sells an AI research and analysis tool built for plaintiffs.
The pitch is simple. Small legal teams take on companies with almost unlimited budgets. FluxCap is meant to close part of that gap.
Kanter calls the product a “force multiplier” for antitrust watchdogs. “This, to me, it’s existential,” he told The Verge. He said enforcement only works over the long term if technology lets scarce resources stretch much further.
The platform runs on proprietary technology and existing large language models. It is built for research and analysis, not for writing filings. It is trained to spot the facts and legal rules that decide whether a case holds up. It also hunts for weak spots in an attorney’s argument.
Trial prep is the second job. FluxCap can sort through large piles of discovery material. It looks for signals that a company acted to protect a monopoly or squeeze rivals.
Antitrust is the first market. Kanter said the company plans to expand into other areas of law later.
The timing is notable. US regulators have spent years chasing Big Tech on competition grounds. Cases move slowly and cost a fortune, which tends to favor the defendant. A cheaper research layer could change how many suits get filed at all. The DOJ’s recent inquiry into Nvidia’s Hugging Face deal shows how broad that enforcement push has become.
There is an irony here. A lawyer who spent years restraining powerful technology companies now sells AI to the lawyers who sue them.
FluxCap has not announced pricing or clients yet.
Source: The Verge
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