Lawsuit accuses Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google of illegal AI 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 consumer value. The suit claims coordination began Sept. 12 when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging industrywide deceleration for safety, with OpenAI's Sam Altman, SpaceXAI's Elon Musk and Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis publicly agreeing. Four named plaintiffs, representing a proposed class of paid subscribers to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok or Gemini, argue the agreement has an anticompetitive effect. Amodei acknowledged potential antitrust issues in his essay, suggesting the U.S. government could mediate or issue a narrow waiver for safety conversations. Altman responded that a federal framework is welcome but said an antitrust exemption isn't necessary to begin safety work. The companies have not yet commented on the lawsuit.