AI firms sued over alleged antitrust agreement to slow development
Four leading artificial-intelligence companies face a class-action lawsuit accusing them of coordinating a slowdown of AI progress, which plaintiffs say violates U.S. antitrust law.
A lawsuit filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California alleges that Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google colluded to decelerate the development of their AI models. The complaint contends the companies violated antitrust statutes by agreeing to limit competition, which the plaintiffs say reduces the value of paid AI subscriptions.
According to the filing, the coordination began on Sept. 12 after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging industry-wide cooperation on safety-focused slowdown. OpenAI chief Sam Altman, SpaceXAI head Elon Musk and DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis each responded publicly in support of the proposal. The suit also cites a July 2026 internal statement in which senior staff from several labs acknowledged competitive pressure not to unilaterally slow development and called for government support of a global slowdown effort.
Lawyers for four subscribers to services such as ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Gemini are seeking class-action status on behalf of other paid users. They argue that while individual firms may choose to pace their work for safety reasons, antitrust law prohibits a collective agreement that substitutes “collective restraint for individual accountability.”
"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," said Nick Rowley, lead attorney for the plaintiffs.
Representatives for the four companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment. In his essay, Amodei suggested that the U.S. government could mediate the discussions or issue a narrow waiver for safety conversations. Altman later said OpenAI welcomes a federal framework setting consistent safety requirements but does not believe an antitrust exemption is needed to begin such work.
The plaintiffs clarified they are not opposed to regulatory action by Congress or executive agencies, but they contend that a private agreement among rivals is unlawful. The filing arrives amid broader political debate over AI regulation, with President Donald Trump publicly rejecting regulatory proposals and announcing an AI task force, while other political leaders have called for stronger oversight.