Lawsuit says Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google made illegal deal on AI slowdown

A new lawsuit claims Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google made an illegal deal to slow the pace of their respective AI development.

The lawsuit, which was filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, argues 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 Sept. 12, the lawsuit argues, when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging for industrywide cooperation on decelerating advancements in favor of enhanced safety measures. 

Amodei warned that swarms of rogue AI agents could take over the internet in as little as six months. He said AI companies should move forward more cautiously and slowly and with the development of the technology. Amodei then suggested a three-point plan in a blog post, which he said had the goal of “pacing the frontier.”

“I don’t think I fully just appreciated what it would actually be like when the progress was as fast as it was,” the CEO told CBS senior business and technology correspondent Jo Ling Kent in an interview on “CBS News Sunday Morning.”

Amodei’s rivals — OpenAI’s Sam Altman, SpaceXAI’s Elon Musk and Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis — confirmed their agreement the same day, the lawsuit said. 

“The antitrust laws do not permit competitors to decide among themselves that competition is too dangerous,” the plaintiffs argue. 

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.

“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.

Representatives for Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and SpaceXAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday.

In his initial essay proposing the slowdown, Amodei acknowledged potential antitrust challenges, writing it would be helpful for the U.S. government to mediate “or at least enable” these cross-lab discussions. The government wouldn’t need to participate, he wrote, but would need to “issue a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations.”

“If we build in the right way, I think the probability of something bad happening is very low,” Amodei said during his interview with CBS News. “If we build in the wrong way, the probability of something bad happening is very high.”