Lawsuit: AI slowdown agreement illegal

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.
The coordination largely took place on Sept. 12, the lawsuit argues, when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging for industrywide cooperation on decelerating advancements in favor of enhanced safety measures. That same day, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk and Google DeepMind’s co-founder and chair 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.
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.
“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.