Lawsuit accuses Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and SpaceXAI of illegally coordinating AI slowdown

A federal antitrust challenge to an alleged AI slowdown pact

A lawsuit filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California accuses Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google of entering an illegal agreement to coordinate the pace of AI development. Multiple outlets, including ABC News, CBS News, Business Standard, India Today and TASS, report that the complaint alleges the coordination violated antitrust law and reduced the value consumers receive from paid AI products such as ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Gemini. CBS News and ABC News note the suit argues that competitors cannot lawfully decide among themselves that competition is too dangerous.

The Sept. 12 episode at the center of the complaint

According to the lawsuit, the coordination largely occurred on Sept. 12, when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay calling for industry-wide cooperation to decelerate frontier progress in favor of enhanced safety measures. The complaint says OpenAI's Sam Altman, SpaceXAI's Elon Musk and Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis each publicly responded in agreement the same day. ABC News reports the plaintiffs characterize the accord as one in which chief rivals agreed progress should be "slower than competition would otherwise produce," producing an anticompetitive effect on consumers.

Amodei's warnings, proposal and antitrust framing

CBS News, drawing on Amodei's essay and an interview on "CBS News Sunday Morning," reports he warned that swarms of rogue AI agents could take over the internet in as little as six months and proposed a three-point plan aimed at "pacing the frontier." Amodei told CBS he had not fully appreciated how rapid progress had become and argued that building AI the right way keeps the probability of something bad happening very low, while building it the wrong way makes that probability very high. ABC News adds that Amodei acknowledged potential antitrust concerns, writing it would be helpful for the U.S. government to mediate "or at least enable" cross-lab discussions and to "issue a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations."

Rivals' responses and the silence of the defendants

CBS News and ABC News report that Altman said on social media OpenAI welcomes a "federal framework that sets consistent safety requirements," but added that "we do not believe we need to wait for an anti-trust exemption or legislation to begin the work of providing this confidence." The same outlets note that representatives for Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and SpaceXAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.

Plaintiffs, the proposed class and lead counsel

Lawyers for four named plaintiffs who pay for ChatGPT, Claude, Grok or Gemini subscriptions are bringing the suit on behalf of a proposed nationwide class of other paid subscribers, according to ABC News and CBS News. Lead attorney Nick Rowley said "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." TASS reports the plaintiffs are represented by the law firm Trial Lawyers for Justice.

What remains unresolved at filing

None of the five outlets report a hearing date, response deadline or preliminary ruling as of Sept. 19. The outlets do not report any government response to Amodei's call for a narrow antitrust waiver or any indication of how the court will schedule early proceedings. ABC News notes that safety coordination has long been discussed by AI leaders, but offers no evidence that prior discussions resulted in formal agreements.