Lawsuit Claims Top AI Companies Made a Secret Deal to Slow Down Their Technology

A new lawsuit says that four of the biggest artificial intelligence companies — Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Google — made an illegal agreement to slow down how fast they build AI. The lawsuit was filed on Friday in a federal court in California. The people suing say that these companies broke laws meant to keep business competition fair, and that their deal hurt customers who pay for AI services.

The lawsuit says the agreement mostly happened on September 12. That was the day Anthropic's CEO, Dario Amodei, published an essay online calling on all major AI companies to slow down their progress together in order to make AI safer. He argued that moving too fast could be dangerous, and that companies should work as a team to be more careful.

On that same day, the leaders of the other three companies responded publicly and said they agreed with Amodei. Sam Altman of OpenAI, Elon Musk of SpaceXAI, and Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind all posted their support. The people filing the lawsuit say that when top rivals in a market agree to slow down like this, it harms the people who use their products — and they call this 'anticompetitive.'

Four people are listed as the main plaintiffs, meaning they are the ones officially bringing the case to court. Each of them pays for a subscription to one of these AI services — ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, or Gemini. Their lawyers are trying to bring the case on behalf of millions of other paying subscribers across the country who might also be affected.

The lead lawyer for the plaintiffs, Nick Rowley, had strong words about the case. He warned that letting powerful technology companies make their own private safety rules could be very dangerous. He said AI could quickly become something humans can no longer control if private companies are the only ones deciding how it grows.

Even Amodei seemed to know that his proposal could cause legal trouble. In his essay, he suggested that the U.S. government step in to help organize talks between AI labs, so the companies would not be breaking any laws. He said the government would need to give a special legal pass — called a 'waiver' — that would allow the companies to talk about safety together without violating the law.

Sam Altman of OpenAI responded on social media, saying his company supports the idea of the government creating a clear set of safety rules for AI. However, he also said that OpenAI does not think it needs to wait for official legal permission before starting to work on AI safety. Representatives for all four companies did not respond when asked for comment, and the debate over who gets to decide how fast AI grows is likely to continue as the lawsuit moves forward.