Antitrust Lawsuit Targets AI Giants Over Alleged Slowdown Coordination

A proposed class-action lawsuit filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California alleges that Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google violated antitrust law by coordinating to slow the pace of their artificial intelligence development.

The complaint argues that an agreement among chief rivals to hold back progress reduces the value that paying customers receive from AI subscriptions. Lawyers for four named plaintiffs — all of whom pay for subscriptions to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok or Gemini — are seeking to represent a nationwide class of other paid subscribers to those services.

The suit points to Sept. 12 as the day the coordination largely unfolded. That day, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay calling for industrywide cooperation to decelerate advances in favour of stronger safety measures. OpenAI's Sam Altman, SpaceXAI's Elon Musk and Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis each publicly responded in agreement the same day, according to the filing.

The plaintiffs contend that an understanding among the leading AI competitors that their progress "should be slower than competition would otherwise produce has an anticompetitive effect on consumers."

Nick Rowley, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, said in a statement that AI could quickly spin out of human control and endanger lives if safety and protocol are governed by private, self-serving agreements among the world's most powerful for-profit technology companies.

In his essay, Amodei acknowledged possible antitrust concerns, writing that it would be helpful for the U.S. government to mediate or at least enable cross-lab discussions. He said the government would not need to take part but would need to issue a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations.

Altman responded on social media that OpenAI welcomes a federal framework setting consistent safety requirements, but added that the company does not believe it needs to wait for an antitrust exemption or legislation to begin that work.

While the recent debate over pacing development has been driven by growing concerns about AI evading human control, several industry leaders have long discussed shared standards or other coordination to keep safety efforts central.

Representatives for Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and SpaceXAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.