Four AI giants sued over coordinated slowdown, accused of collusion
The industry push to slow AI development has turned into an antitrust suit; the legal boundary of lab-to-lab safety coordination is what to watch.
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A proposed class action filed September 19 in the Northern District of California accuses Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google of illegally agreeing to slow AI development, harming paying subscribers.
The complaint pins the alleged coordination on September 12, when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a call for the industry to slow down and the heads of OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google DeepMind publicly endorsed it the same day. The four named plaintiffs are paying subscribers of ChatGPT, Claude, Grok or Gemini.
These are allegations only; the four companies had not responded, and no ruling exists. The plaintiffs do not object to companies independently slowing for safety, but to a collective agreement replacing individual decisions.