AI Slowdown Pact Faces Antitrust Lawsuit From Subscribers

Four paid subscribers sued Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google on Friday, arguing their coordinated AI slowdown agreement violates antitrust law.

A new class-action lawsuit filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California claims Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google made an illegal agreement to slow the pace of their AI development. The lawsuit argues the leading AI companies violated antitrust laws by coordinating slowdown efforts, and that doing so would reduce the value consumers get from paid AI subscriptions. Four named plaintiffs, all paying subscribers to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok or Gemini, are bringing the suit on behalf of a proposed nationwide class of other paid subscribers. Representatives for Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and SpaceXAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The lawsuit places AI safety concerns in direct tension with competition law, a collision few anticipated when the executives made their public calls for coordinated restraint. The plaintiffs do not object to companies individually slowing their own progress for safety. Instead, they argue antitrust laws forbid rivals from taking the "shortcut" of agreeing to "substitute collective restraint for individual accountability." Lead attorney Nick Rowley went further, saying "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 case tests whether competitors can cooperate on existential risk without crossing antitrust lines.

The lawsuit argues the coordination largely took place on September 12, when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging industrywide cooperation on decelerating advancements in favor of enhanced safety measures. That same day, 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. The lawsuit also alleges the coordination began months earlier, pointing to a July 2026 statement signed by high-ranking employees from several leading AI labs that acknowledged the "intense competitive pressure not to unilaterally slow" development. According to CBS News, Amodei warned in his essay that swarms of rogue AI agents could take over the internet in as little as six months.

The plaintiffs argue that an agreement among the chief rivals in AI that their progress "should be slower than competition would otherwise produce has an anticompetitive effect on consumers." Consumers pay for increasingly capable AI services and could receive less value if the companies producing the leading systems collectively restrain how quickly those products improve. The dispute could turn on the distinction between advocating common government rules and reaching an agreement among competitors themselves. The executives' public statements called for stronger safety measures and a federal framework, while the plaintiffs characterize their responses as evidence the companies had aligned on slowing development, according to the Milwaukee Independent's account of the filing.

The path to government-enabled collaboration looks steep. President Donald Trump rejected the calls for regulation on social media, claiming efforts to limit the technology are part of a "conspiracy" and questioning why industry leaders would seek rules that, if strongly implemented, would "drive them into oblivion and bankruptcy." Trump said Saturday he is forming an AI task force and will appoint an "AI czar," though he provided scant detail. Even Republicans skeptical of Big Tech have resisted the collaboration. Sen. Josh Hawley said in a recent Senate hearing that "there is no world" in which he would give "the most powerful companies in the history of the world" an antitrust exemption, arguing they could collude and stifle competition.

Amodei had acknowledged the antitrust risk in his original essay, writing that it would be helpful for the U.S. government to mediate "or at least enable" cross-lab safety discussions, requiring only a "narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations." Altman responded on social media that OpenAI welcomes a "federal framework that sets consistent safety requirements," but said "we do not believe we need to wait for an antitrust exemption or legislation to begin the work of providing this confidence." Meanwhile, Tom's Hardware reports Chinese state media criticized the proposal as a club whose membership rules exclude Beijing, calling a global AI-safety framework without China "not quite global." The companies have not yet filed responses to the complaint.