AI Giants Accused of Secret Pact to Slow Down Tech

A lawsuit has been filed against four prominent AI companies, alleging that they have colluded to slow the development of their artificial intelligence systems. The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, names Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Google as defendants.

The plaintiffs claim that the CEOs of these companies - Dario Amodei (Anthropic), Sam Altman (OpenAI), Elon Musk (SpaceXAI), and Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind) - made an illegal agreement to slow down AI development. This alleged collusion is said to be in response to growing concerns over the risks posed by increasingly powerful AI.

According to the lawsuit, Amodei had proposed 'industry-wide coordination' to 'pace the frontier' of AI development, suggesting that the government could provide a waiver for certain safety conversations among companies. However, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) rejected this idea during a Senate hearing, stating that it would give powerful companies antitrust exemptions to collude.