AI Giants Sued Over Alleged Deal to Slow Development

A new lawsuit filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California alleges Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google made an illegal deal to slow AI development, violating antitrust laws and reducing subscription value. The suit claims coordination began Sept. 12 when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei urged industrywide deceleration for safety, warning rogue AI agents could take over the internet within six months. OpenAI's Sam Altman, SpaceXAI's Elon Musk and Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis confirmed agreement that day, according to the filing. Four named plaintiffs, paying subscribers to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok or Gemini, seek class-action status on behalf of other paid users. Amodei acknowledged potential antitrust issues in his essay, suggesting the U.S. government could issue a narrow waiver for safety conversations.