Former DOJ Antitrust Chief Jonathan Kanter Launches AI Startup to Help Sue Monopolists

The company, FluxCap, was started with Doha Mekki, who served as acting head of the division. Its staff includes former Justice Department lawyers and former Palantir engineers. In an interview with The Verge, Kanter called the product a "force multiplier" for antitrust enforcers who face far larger opponents. FluxCap is starting with antitrust cases and plans to move into other areas of law later.

The launch is a bet that AI can help close the resource gap between regulators and the companies they pursue. Kanter argues that large companies can always field bigger legal teams, so the only way for enforcement to work over time is for technology to make scarce staff go further. "This, to me, it's existential," he told The Verge.

According to The Verge, the platform combines FluxCap's own technology with existing large language models and is built mainly for research and analysis. It is meant to identify the facts and legal framework that will decide whether a case succeeds, and to find gaps in a lawyer's reasoning. For trial preparation, it can search large volumes of discovery documents for signs of anticompetitive conduct.

Kanter said the hardest part was getting the system to find relevant evidence. Executives rarely describe themselves as monopolists, so the meaning of a message often depends on its context. He pointed to the government's case against Live Nation-Ticketmaster. In that trial, a recorded call between Live Nation's chief executive and a venue customer was played in court, and the customer testified that he understood it as a "not-so-veiled" threat.

FluxCap's lawyers spent months testing the system on real and hypothetical cases. Kanter said general-purpose tools struggle with this work because "lawyering isn't about right or wrong answers." He said every antitrust lawyer has tried ChatGPT or the legal AI product Harvey, and that such tools "do okay" but "miss the nuance."

The company names antitrust boutique Kressin Powers as one of its first customers. Kanter said FluxCap is also in talks with public and private enforcers. He estimated the tool gives a small team the capacity of roughly "20-plus people working around the clock."

Kanter said the gap in resources is sharpest for state attorneys general. They have kept bringing antitrust cases while the Trump administration has pulled back, and this year they won a case against Live Nation after the Justice Department settled. "A large state AG might have 10 people working on a case," he said. Congress gave the entire Antitrust Division $245 million for fiscal 2026, and it employs more than 400 attorneys across all its areas of work. That is small next to the legal teams of the technology companies it has sued. Under the Biden administration, the division took Google to trial twice and brought monopolisation cases against Apple and Live Nation.

The idea grew out of Kanter's time at the division. While he was there, it won a $45.5 million grant from the federal Technology Modernization Fund to improve its case management and evidence review tools, but Kanter said his team never got to use the money before leaving office.

He said technology alone will not even out the contest, because government agencies need more budget and staff. Even then, he said, defendants' resources are likely to far exceed anything federal agencies, states or private plaintiffs can muster.