A new lawsuit accuses Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Google of illegally coordinating to restrain competition by agreeing to "pace the frontier" of advanced AI. The complaint was filed Friday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, the Hill reports. It leans heavily on a September essay by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei urging "industry-wide coordination" to limit how quickly AI systems become more capable. Within hours of that essay's publication on Sept. 12, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis publicly endorsed the idea, statements the plaintiffs say amount to an anticompetitive pact.
Lawyers representing four named plaintiffs, who pay for subscriptions to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, or Gemini, are bringing the suit on behalf of a proposed nationwide class of other paid subscribers to those services, per the AP. Lead attorney Nick Rowley argues guardrails for AI should come from public regulation, not private deals among dominant firms. "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," he said.
Amodei had sparked antitrust concerns when he floated the idea of a narrow waiver to allow safety discussions, a proposal that Republican Sen. Josh Hawley dismissed, saying he would not bless exemptions that let a handful of tech giants collude. Representatives for Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and SpaceXAI did not immediately comment on the lawsuit.
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
