SACRAMENTO, California — AI giants Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google are facing allegations of collusion following recent calls for a coordinated slowdown of AI development, according to a civil lawsuit filed in federal court Friday.
The complaint claims that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s public plea earlier this month for “industry-wide coordination” to “pace the frontier” of AI advancement, which drew agreement from SpaceXAI head Elon Musk, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis, amounted to an illegal business agreement between competitors under U.S. antitrust law.
Nick Rowley, one of the lawyers who filed the suit in the Northern District Court of California on behalf of four plaintiffs, said the case was filed to ensure “private self-serving agreements between the world’s most powerful ‘for profit’ technology companies” don’t result in AI “quickly spin[ing] out of human control.”