Suit challenges the deal Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Google made to slow down AI development
Paying subscribers to artificial intelligence chatbots ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Gemini are suing AI giants Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Google for breaching antitrust law through their joint agreement to decelerate AI development, reported The Associated Press.
Four named plaintiffs brought the suit to US District Court for the Northern District of California on Friday September 18. Their lawyers indicated the suit is being filed on behalf of a pitched nationwide class of other paying subscribers, according to AP News.
The suit asserted that the coordinated slowdown effort would limit the value of AI subscriptions for paying consumers. The challenge follows Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s call earlier this month to slow down AI development so that safety measures can catch up, which was supported by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk, and Google DeepMind co-founder and chair Demis Hassabis.
The call included a request for the US government to “issue a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations,” per a snippet of Amodei’s proposal that was published by AP News.
The plaintiffs said an anticompetitive effect would result from an agreement among rivals that AI development’s progress should be “slower than competition would otherwise produce,” per a statement published by AP News. The suit claimed that a July statement signed by high-ranking staff from leading AI labs, which urged the government to back an international initiative to decelerate the development of automated AI, noted the “intense competitive pressure not to unilaterally slow” this development, per AP News.
Nonetheless, the plaintiffs clarified that they supported each company’s independent decision to slow progress for safety reasons.
“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 plaintiffs’ lead attorney, in a statement published by AP News.
Neither were the plaintiffs challenging the companies’ request that Congress, the White House, and other agencies develop AI regulation or arguing against companies seeking an antitrust exemption. The suit indicated that the issue was with the substitution of “collective restraint for individual accountability” in the “shortcut” taken by the AI companies that subverted antitrust laws, per a snippet of the suit published by AP News.
The publication said Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and SpaceXAI representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment made on Saturday September 19.
