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

A new lawsuit claims that Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Google made an illegal agreement to slow down the development of their artificial intelligence technology. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges that the companies violated antitrust laws by coordinating their efforts to decelerate advancements in AI.

According to CityNews, this coordination largely took place on September 12, when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging for industry-wide cooperation on safety measures, which was publicly supported by the CEOs of OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Google DeepMind.

The plaintiffs, who pay for subscriptions to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, or Gemini, argue that this agreement will reduce the value they get from their paid AI subscriptions. They claim that the coordination among the companies will have an anticompetitive effect on consumers. The lawsuit seeks to represent a proposed nationwide class of other paid subscribers to those services.

The lawsuit highlights concerns about the rapid development of AI and the need for safety measures. However, the plaintiffs argue that private agreements between companies should not control AI safety and protocol, and that this could lead to AI spinning out of human control.

Brief written by urgent.news from PBS NewsHour, CityNews, Winnipeg Free Press, Mashable, The Hill — 5 reports on this story. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.