Lawsuit Targets AI Giants Over Alleged Illegal Slowdown Pact
A lawsuit has been filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California against leading AI companies, alleging that they made an illegal agreement to slow down their respective AI development.
The plaintiffs claim that Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Google coordinated efforts to slow down advancements in favor of enhanced safety measures, which would reduce the value consumers get from paid AI subscriptions.
The coordination allegedly took place on September 12th when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging industrywide cooperation on decelerating advancements. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk, and Google DeepMind's co-founder and chair Demis Hassabis publicly responded in agreement.
The lawsuit argues that this coordination has an anticompetitive effect on consumers and is against antitrust laws. The plaintiffs are not opposed to the companies individually deciding to slow their progress but argue that they should not be able to agree collectively to do so.