US Lawsuit Claims Top AI Firms Colluded to Slow Down Development
A new lawsuit in the US claims that leading AI companies Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Google colluded to slow down their AI development. The case argues that these companies violated antitrust laws by coordinating efforts to decelerate progress, thereby reducing the value consumers receive from paid AI subscriptions.
The lawsuit was filed on Friday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, brought by lawyers for four named plaintiffs who pay for subscriptions to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, or Gemini. The case seeks to represent a proposed nationwide class of other paid subscribers to these services.
According to the lawsuit, the coordination largely took place on September 12, when Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei published an essay calling for industry-wide cooperation to slow advances in favor of stronger safety measures. OpenAI's Sam Altman, SpaceXAI's Elon Musk, and Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis publicly responded in support of Amodei's proposals on the same day.
The plaintiffs argue that an agreement among major AI rivals that progress 'should be slower than competition would otherwise produce' has 'an anticompetitive effect on consumers.' They say such coordination would lessen the benefits available to people paying for these AI services.