A new lawsuit claims Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google made an illegal deal to of their respective AI development.
The lawsuit, which was filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, argues that the leading AI companies violated antitrust laws when they agreed to coordinate slowdown efforts, and that doing so would reduce the value consumers get for paid AI subscriptions.
The coordination largely took place on Sept. 12, the lawsuit argues, when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay on decelerating advancements in favor of enhanced safety measures. That same day, OpenAI's Sam Altman, SpaceXAI's Elon Musk and Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis each publicly .
It's clear that an agreement among the chief rivals in AI that their progress 鈥渟hould be slower than competition would otherwise produce has an anticompetitive effect on consumers,鈥 the plaintiffs argue.
Lawyers representing four named plaintiffs, who pay for subscriptions to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok or Gemini, are bringing the suit on behalf of a proposed nationwide class of other paid subscribers to those services.
鈥淎I will quickly spin out of human control and could kill us all if we allow AI safety and protocol ... to be controlled by private self-serving agreements between the world鈥檚 most powerful 鈥榝or profit鈥 technology companies,鈥 said Nick Rowley, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs.
Representatives for Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and SpaceXAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday.
In his initial essay proposing the slowdown, Amodei acknowledged potential antitrust challenges, writing that it would be helpful for the US government to mediate 鈥渙r at least enable鈥 these cross-lab discussions. The government wouldn't need to participate, he wrote, but would need to 鈥渋ssue a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations.鈥
In response, Altman said on social media that OpenAI welcomes the idea of a 鈥渇ederal framework that sets consistent safety requirements,鈥 but said 鈥渨e do not believe we need to wait for an anti-trust exemption or legislation to begin the work of providing this confidence.鈥
While the recent conversations about pacing development were spurred by increasing concerns about , several leaders in the AI space have long talked about developing a shared set of standards or otherwise coordinating to ensure safety efforts remained paramount.