A lawsuit filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California alleges that major artificial intelligence companies Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Google engaged in an illegal agreement to decelerate their respective AI development.

The suit contends that these industry leaders have violated antitrust laws by coordinating efforts to slow down progress, arguing this action diminishes the value consumers receive from paid AI subscriptions.

The core of the lawsuit points to coordinated public statements made on September 12. On that day, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay advocating for industry-wide cooperation on decelerating AI advancements to prioritize enhanced safety measures. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk, and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis publicly agreed with Amodei's proposals on the same day.

Plaintiffs argue that such an agreement among major AI rivals to deliberately slow progress "has an anticompetitive effect on consumers." The lawsuit was brought by four named plaintiffs, who subscribe to services like ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, or Gemini, on behalf of a proposed nationwide class of other paid subscribers.

Lead attorney for the plaintiffs, Nick Rowley, stated that "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." The suit claims these actions reduce consumer value for paid AI subscriptions.

In his essay, Amodei acknowledged potential antitrust concerns, suggesting that U.S. government mediation or a "narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations" could be beneficial. Altman responded on social media, welcoming the idea of a "federal framework that sets consistent safety requirements" but stated that "we do not believe we need to wait for an anti-trust exemption or legislation to begin the work of providing this confidence."

While the lawsuit centers on recent discussions about development pacing driven by concerns over AI's potential to evade human control, leaders in the AI field have long discussed the need for shared standards and coordination to ensure safety.

Representatives for Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and SpaceXAI had not immediately responded to requests for comment as of Saturday. The lawsuit seeks to represent a class of consumers who pay for AI subscription services.