Lawsuit accuses AI firms of illegal slowdown pact

A new lawsuit filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California alleges Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google illegally agreed to slow their AI development, violating antitrust laws and reducing value for paid subscribers. The suit claims coordination began Sept. 12 when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging industrywide cooperation on decelerating advancements for safety, with OpenAI's Sam Altman, SpaceXAI's Elon Musk and Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis publicly agreeing the same day. Four named plaintiffs, representing a proposed nationwide class of paid subscribers to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok or Gemini, argue the rivals' agreement on slower progress has an anticompetitive effect on consumers. Amodei's essay acknowledged potential antitrust challenges, suggesting the U.S. government mediate or issue a narrow waiver for safety conversations, while Altman responded that OpenAI welcomes a federal framework but does not believe an antitrust exemption is necessary. The companies had not responded to requests for comment as of Saturday.