AI giants sued over alleged pact to slow development

Four leading AI companies were sued Friday by their subscribers for allegedly coordinating an effort to slow the pace at which each company improves the competing products it sells to consumers.

The complaint, filed Friday in San Francisco, said the public discussion by leaders of Anthropic PBC, OpenAI Inc., Space Exploration Technologies Corp., and Alphabet Inc.-owned Google LLC recommending "industrywide coordination" violates antitrust law.

The complaint, filed by Nicholas C. Rowley's Trial Lawyers for Justice, accused Anthropic PBC CEO Dario Amodei of working with his competitors when he published a Sept. 12 essay, "We Must Pace the Frontier."

Amodei's essay called on leading AI labs to work together to set "limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress" -- a bid that quickly drew agreement from SpaceX founder Elon Musk, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis.

The essay followed several days of statements by current and former AI company officials who warned that the growth of AI was getting out of control and warning that executives were losing control of computer programs.

A former Anthropic researcher who resigned said that it's possible that there was a 10% chance that the technology could kill all of humanity.

But Andrew T. Tutt of Trial Lawyers for Justice wrote in the complaint that the move for coordination violated the Sherman Act.

"The antitrust laws do not permit competitors to decide among themselves that competition is too dangerous," he wrote.

"Whether frontier AI should develop more slowly is a question for each company acting alone, or for Congress and the agencies. It is not a question that four competitors may answer together," he added. Buist et al. v. Anthropic PBC et al., 26-cv-10693 (N.D. Cal., filed Sept. 18, 2026).

The plaintiffs allege those public statements were not merely expressions of agreement about AI safety but evidence of a horizontal agreement among competitors, pointing additionally to a working group through which representatives of Anthropic, OpenAI and Google allegedly had been meeting since July to develop an industry standards body.

"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," Rowley said in a statement.

Tutt, in the complaint, wrote that "the lesson of every previous transformative industry is that safety and responsibility are properly the work of each company acting on its own, not a cartel license."

The plaintiffs, subscribers to the AI services, sought preliminary and permanent injunctive relief under Section 16 of the Clayton Act as well as monetary damages.

Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and SpaceX could not be reached for comment as of press time.