Lawsuit accuses OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and SpaceXAI 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 made an illegal agreement to slow AI development, violating antitrust laws and reducing value for paid subscribers. The plaintiffs, four paying subscribers to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok or Gemini, argue the coordination began Sept. 12 when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging industrywide slowdowns for safety, with OpenAI’s Sam Altman, SpaceXAI’s Elon Musk and Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis publicly agreeing. The suit seeks class-action status, claiming the rivals' pact on slower progress has an anticompetitive effect on consumers. Lead attorney Nick Rowley warned that AI could "spin out of human control" if safety protocols are governed by private agreements among for-profit tech firms. Amodei had acknowledged antitrust risks, suggesting a US government waiver for safety discussions, while Altman said a federal framework would be welcome but not required to proceed.