Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, Google made ‘illegal’ agreement on AI slowdown, says new lawsuit

A new lawsuit claimed that tech giants Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google made an “illegal” deal to slow the pace of their respective AI development, news agency Associated Press reported.

The lawsuit was filed Friday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.

What does the lawsuit claim?

According to the report, it argues that the leading AI companies violated antitrust laws when they agreed to coordinate slowdown efforts, and that doing so would reduce the value consumers get for paid AI subscriptions.

The coordination largely took place on September 12, the lawsuit argues, when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging for industry-wide cooperation on decelerating advancements in favour of enhanced safety measures.

That same day, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk and Google DeepMind's co-founder and chair Demis Hassabis each publicly responded to Amodei's proposals in agreement.

It's clear that an agreement among the chief rivals in AI that their progress "should be slower than competition would otherwise produce has an anti-competitive effect on consumers," the plaintiffs argued, as per AP.

Lawyers representing four named plaintiffs, who pay for subscriptions to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok or Gemini, are bringing the suit on behalf of a proposed nationwide class of other paid subscribers to those services.

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit contend they are not against the AI companies asking Congress, the White House or any other agency to develop AI regulation, nor are they against the companies asking for an antitrust exemption.

But achieving that kind of collaboration with the federal government could be an uphill battle.

"AI will quickly spin out of human control and could kill us all if we allow AI safety and protocol ... to be controlled by private self-serving agreements between the world's most powerful for profit' technology companies," said Nick Rowley, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs.