Technology and Science20 September, 20263 min read
Lawsuit Says Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, Google Illegally Coordinated AI Slowdown
This article is an automated aggregation of coverage from news outlets. Our editorials offer in-depth analysis curated by the NewsCord team.
Companies Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, Google allegedly coordinated an illegal antitrust slowdown of AI development. Filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
6 outlets told this the same way.
Slowdown Deal Lawsuit
A new lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California accuses Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google of making an illegal deal to slow the pace of their respective AI development.
The complaint says the coordination largely took place on Sept. 12, when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging for industrywide cooperation on decelerating advancements in favor of enhanced safety measures.
In that essay, Amodei warned that swarms of rogue AI agents could take over the internet in as little as six months, and he said AI companies should move forward and slowly and with the development of the technology.
The lawsuit argues the companies violated antitrust laws by agreeing to coordinate slowdown efforts, and it says doing so would reduce the value consumers get for paid AI subscriptions.
Nick Rowley, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, said, "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," as the suit seeks a proposed nationwide class of other paid subscribers.
Public Responses and Pushback
The lawsuit points to Sept. 12 as the day when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk and Google DeepMind co-founder and chair Demis Hassabis each publicly responded to Amodei’s proposals in agreement.
It also alleges the coordination began to take shape months earlier, pointing to a July 2026 statement signed by high-ranking employees from several leading AI labs that acknowledged "intense competitive pressure not to unilaterally slow" development.
Amodei’s essay acknowledged potential antitrust challenges, writing it would be helpful for the U.S. government to mediate "or at least enable" these cross-lab discussions and that the government would need to "issue a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations."
In response, Altman said on social media that OpenAI welcomes the idea of a "federal framework that sets consistent safety requirements," but added "we do not believe we need to wait for an antitrust exemption or legislation to begin the work."
In a separate discussion of the debate, TechCrunch’s Equity podcast segment quoted Sean O’Kane saying, "We have a federal government at the moment that certainly does not seem eager to enforce regulations broadly speaking," and it also quoted him saying, "There does not seem like there is a ton of consumer choice driving this market."
Regulation Stakes and Next
The lawsuit does not challenge companies individually choosing to slow their own AI development, but it contests coordinating that restraint with rivals, arguing antitrust law forbids using the "shortcut" of agreeing to "substitute collective restraint for individual accountability."
The Verge describes a wider push-and-pull around a "superintelligence slowdown," noting that after researchers warned that AI could kill us all, leading US AI companies are publicly suggesting it’s time to "pace the frontier" of bleeding-edge AI development.
In California, The Verge says Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order Friday directing the state to convene a group of experts that will deliver recommendations within two months on how to strengthen AI safety measures in state law.
The Verge reports the order directs the group to consider how the state could require AI companies to embed independent verification groups onsite for regular audits and create a "kill switch" that’s routinely verified as effective, including requiring companies to report "loss-of-control incidents" like the OpenAI attack on Hugging Face as critical safety incidents.
Meanwhile, Straight Arrow quotes Sen. Josh Hawley saying there is "no world" in which he would grant "the most powerful companies in the history of the world" an exemption from antitrust laws to collaborate, framing the dispute as whether safety should be handled through regulation rather than a cartel license.