Subscribers sue Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google, calling the AI slowdown pact an antitrust violation
A proposed nationwide class action filed in the Northern District of California says the September 12 agreement to decelerate lowers the value of paid ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Gemini plans.
A lawsuit filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California accuses Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google of violating antitrust law by agreeing to slow their AI development, Fortune reports. The complaint points to September 12, the day Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging industrywide cooperation on decelerating in favor of stronger safety measures. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk and Google DeepMind co-founder and chair Demis Hassabis each publicly responded in agreement that same day. The plaintiffs argue that an agreement among chief rivals that progress should be slower than competition would otherwise produce has an anticompetitive effect on consumers, and that it reduces the value people get from paid AI subscriptions. Four named plaintiffs who pay for ChatGPT, Claude, Grok or Gemini are suing on behalf of a proposed nationwide class of paid subscribers to those services. The filing moves a week of political argument about antitrust exemptions for the labs into court. Separately on Saturday, The Verge's Decoder podcast published an interview with former Department of Justice antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter on whether an AI slowdown amounts to a cartel and whether the industry needs an exemption. The labs' responses to the suit were not included in the reporting.