“AI will quickly spin out of control and could kill all of us 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,” said Nick Rowley, lead attorney for the four plaintiffs.
A recently-filed lawsuit accuses Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, and Google of making an illegal deal to slow the pace of artificial intelligence development.
According to The Associated Press, the lawsuit was filed Friday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in. The complaint accuses the four defendant companies of violating a series of antitrust laws by coordinating a slowdown, thereby reducing the value of existing customers’ paid chatbot subscriptions.
The allegedly unlawful coordination, lawyers say, began on September 12, when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging for increased cooperation across the industry, saying it would likely be in society’s best interests to slow down development while prioritizing safety. Later the same day, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, xAI CEO Elon Musk, and Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis each publicly responded to Amodei’s proposals, voicing their agreement with the need for more curbs on artificial intelligence.
However, the lawsuit indicates that coordination began much earlier. In July 2026, for instance, high-level employees from several AI laboratories signed a statement acknowledging “intense collective pressure not to unilaterally slow” development. The same statement called on the government to support an international slowdown.
Lawyers for the small group of plaintiffs—who pay for subscriptions to services like ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Gemini—say that the case was filed as a prospective class-action, meaning that other chatbot-users could be entitled to join at a later date.
Notably, the plaintiffs say they aren’t opposed to each company making an individual decision to decelerate. Instead, they are opposed to the companies’ alleged violation of antitrust measures by taking the “shortcut” of agreeing to “substitute collective restraint for individual accountability.”
“AI will quickly spin out of control and could kill all of us 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,” said Nick Rowley, lead attorney for the four plaintiffs.
The Associated Press notes that, in recent months, artificial intelligence has become a hot-button issue. President Doanld Trump has repeatedly rejected calls for regulation, deriding opponents of AI as engaging in a “conspiracy” against the American economy. His administration has repeatedly pushed for technology companies to outpace competitors in China, despite Democratic legislators’ requests for more restrictions and better-monitored development.
Chinese media has since offered its own reaction to the planned slowdown, casting it as a bad-faith attempt to stifle that country’s rapidly-growing AI industry. China Daily, for instance, said that Amodei and other American AI executives are acting like “a club whose membership rules have been drafted before the guest list is announced,” saying that any coordinated “global AI-safety framework that excludes China is not quite global.”
Sources
Lawsuit says Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google made illegal agreement on AI slowdown
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