Lawsuit Targets Leading AI Companies Over Alleged Slowdown Agreement

A new lawsuit has been filed against Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Google, alleging that they made an illegal agreement to slow down their respective AI development efforts.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, claims that the companies coordinated a slowdown on September 12, 2023, after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging industrywide cooperation on decelerating advancements in favor of enhanced safety measures.

Amodei's essay was followed by public responses from OpenAI's Sam Altman, SpaceXAI's Elon Musk, and Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis, who all agreed with the proposal to slow down AI development.

The plaintiffs argue that this agreement has an anticompetitive effect on consumers and reduces the value they get for paid AI subscriptions. The lawsuit seeks to represent a nationwide class of other paid subscribers to services like ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, or Gemini.