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 that 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 on Sept. 12, when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging industrywide slowdowns for safety, and OpenAI's Sam Altman, SpaceXAI's Elon Musk, and Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis publicly agreed. Four named plaintiffs, representing a proposed nationwide class of paid subscribers to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, or Gemini, argue the rivals' pact has an anticompetitive effect on consumers. Amodei acknowledged potential antitrust issues in his essay, suggesting the U.S. government mediate or issue a narrow waiver for safety conversations. Altman responded that a federal framework is welcome but not required to begin safety work, while AI leaders have long discussed shared standards amid concerns about AI evading human control.