AI Giants Accused of Secret Deal to Slow Down Development
A new lawsuit claims that Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Google made an illegal agreement to slow down their respective AI development. The lawsuit 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, when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging industrywide cooperation on decelerating advancements in favor of enhanced safety measures. That same day, OpenAI's Sam Altman, SpaceXAI's Elon Musk, and Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis each publicly responded to Amodei's proposals in agreement.
Lawyers representing four named plaintiffs are bringing the suit on behalf of a proposed nationwide class of paid subscribers to AI services like ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Gemini. '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. Amodei acknowledged potential antitrust challenges in his initial essay, writing that it would be helpful for the US government to mediate or issue a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations.