Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google allegedly reached an illegal agreement to slow the development of their respective artificial intelligence systems, according to a new lawsuit.
Filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the complaint alleges that the major AI companies violated antitrust laws by coordinating efforts to decelerate progress. The plaintiffs argue that such an arrangement would diminish the value customers receive from paid AI subscriptions.
The alleged coordination centered on Sept. 12, when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay calling for industrywide cooperation to slow AI advances in favor of stronger safety measures. That same day, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SpaceXAI’s Elon Musk and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis publicly responded to Amodei’s proposal and expressed agreement.
The plaintiffs contend that an agreement among the AI industry’s leading rivals to make progress “slower than competition would otherwise produce has an anticompetitive effect on consumers.”
The lawsuit was filed by attorneys representing four named plaintiffs who subscribe to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok or Gemini. They are seeking to represent a proposed nationwide class of other customers who pay for those services.
“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 plaintiffs’ lead attorney.
Representatives for Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and SpaceXAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday.
Amodei acknowledged the potential antitrust concerns in his original essay, saying the U.S. government could mediate—or at least enable—discussions among AI labs. He wrote that the government would not need to participate directly but should issue “a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations.”
Altman responded on social media that OpenAI supports a “federal framework that sets consistent safety requirements.” However, he added: “we do not believe we need to wait for an anti-trust exemption or legislation to begin the work of providing this confidence.”
The latest debate over slowing AI development follows growing concerns that advanced systems could evade human control. Still, AI leaders have discussed shared standards and other forms of coordination for years as they seek to keep safety efforts at the forefront.
