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

A new lawsuit alleges that Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Google conspired to intentionally slow down their respective artificial intelligence development, potentially violating antitrust laws. The agreement allegedly emerged on September 12 when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay advocating for industrywide cooperation on decelerating advancements in favor of enhanced safety measures.

OpenAI's Sam Altman, SpaceXAI's Elon Musk, and Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis each publicly responded to Amodei's proposals in agreement. The plaintiffs argue that the coordinated slowdown would reduce the value consumers receive for paid AI subscriptions. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, seeks to represent a nationwide class of paid subscribers to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, or Gemini.