OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and SpaceXAI face antitrust lawsuit over conspiring against consumers

A new lawsuit claims Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Google made an illegal deal to slow the pace of their respective AI development.

The lawsuit, which was filed on September 18 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, argues that the leading AI companies violated antitrust laws when they agreed to coordinate slowdown efforts, and that doing so would reduce the value consumers get for paid AI subscriptions.

At the center of the case is the question of whether public agreement over the pace of AI development amounted to coordination among competitors rather than independent decisions by individual companies.

The plaintiffs contend that consumers pay for increasingly capable AI services and could receive less value if the companies producing the leading systems collectively restrain how quickly those products improve.

That argument places the companies’ safety concerns in direct tension with competition law. AI developers have increasingly discussed common safeguards and shared standards as their systems become more capable, but the lawsuit argues that competitors cannot privately coordinate limits on development in ways that reduce competitive pressure.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei himself acknowledged the potential antitrust issue when he suggested that the federal government could authorize narrowly defined safety discussions among AI labs.

The coordination largely took place on September 12, the lawsuit argues, when Amodei published an essay urging for industrywide cooperation on decelerating advancements in favor of enhanced safety measures.

That same day, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, SpaceXAI’s Elon Musk, and Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis each publicly responded to Amodei’s proposals in agreement.

It’s clear that an agreement among the chief rivals in AI that their progress “should be slower than competition would otherwise produce has an anticompetitive effect on consumers,” the plaintiffs argue.

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.

“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, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs.

Representatives for Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and SpaceXAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In his initial essay proposing the slowdown, Amodei acknowledged potential antitrust challenges, writing that it would be helpful for the U.S. government to mediate “or at least enable” these cross-lab discussions.

The government wouldn’t need to participate, he wrote, but would need to “issue a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations.”

In response, Altman said on social media that OpenAI welcomes the idea of a “federal framework that sets consistent safety requirements,” but said “we do not believe we need to wait for an anti-trust exemption or legislation to begin the work of providing this confidence.”

The dispute could turn in part on the distinction between advocating common government rules and reaching an agreement among competitors themselves. The executives’ public statements called for stronger safety measures and a federal framework, while the plaintiffs characterize their responses as evidence that the companies had aligned on slowing development.

Calls to establish shared AI safety practices have become increasingly louder across the tech industry. The lawsuit challenges whether those efforts crossed a line when they involved companies that compete directly for subscribers, investment, talent, and technological leadership, raising a broader question about how rivals can cooperate on emerging risks without diminishing competition.

While the recent conversations about pacing development were spurred by increasing fears about AI evading human control, and the lack of accountability of AI tech companies, several leaders in the AI space have long talked about developing a shared set of safety standards. Such an idea has, until lately, been ingnored in the unregulated expansion of AI infrastructure and the reace for market share.

Donald Trump rejected the calls for regulation on social media. He has claimed that any efforts to limit the technology are part of a “conspiracy.” He called into question why the industry leaders would be calling for regulation that, he says, “if strongly implemented, will drive them into oblivion and bankruptcy.” Trump said Saturday on social media that he is forming an AI task force and will appoint an “AI czar,” but he provided scant detail.