A new class-action lawsuit claims Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Google made an illegal agreement to slow the pace of frontier AI development — and that the coordination cuts the value consumers get from paid AI subscriptions, AP reported via The Hindu.
The suit, filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, centers on Sept. 12, when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging industry cooperation on decelerating for safety. The same day, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk, and Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis publicly agreed with the thrust of Amodei’s pitch.
Four named plaintiffs who pay for ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, or Gemini are seeking to represent a nationwide class of paid subscribers. Lead attorney Nick Rowley said: “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.”
Amodei had acknowledged antitrust concerns and asked for a narrow government waiver for certain safety talks. Altman said OpenAI welcomes a federal safety framework but does not believe the labs need an antitrust exemption to begin. The labs did not immediately respond Saturday. President Trump rejected regulation calls and announced an AI task force plus an “AI czar” Saturday with scant detail. Sen. Josh Hawley has opposed giving the labs an antitrust exemption.
Sources: The Hindu (AP)
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