Lawsuit says Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google made illegal agreement on AI slowdown

A new lawsuit claims Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google made an illegal deal to slow the pace 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.

“AI 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’s most powerful ‘for profit’ technology companies,” said Nick Rowley, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs.

The coordination largely took place on Sept. 12, the lawsuit argues, when Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei published an essay calling for industrywide cooperation 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 responded to Amodei’s proposals in agreement.

It’s clear that an agreement among the chief rivals in AI that their progress “should be slower than competition would otherwise produce has an anticompetitive effect on consumers,” the plaintiffs argue.