Trump Forms AI Task Force, Slams Slowdown as 'Conspiracy'

President Trump said Saturday he is forming an AI task force and appointing an 'AI czar,' rejecting the frontier labs' coordinated slowdown as a 'conspiracy.'

The announcement came a day after four paid subscribers of ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Gemini filed a class action in the Northern District of California against Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google. Trump has rejected the labs' slowdown push outright, calling efforts to limit the technology part of a 'conspiracy' and questioning why industry leaders would seek regulation that, he argues, would 'drive them into oblivion and bankruptcy.' Representatives for the four companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The complaint centers on September 12, when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging industrywide cooperation on decelerating AI advancement in favor of enhanced safety measures. OpenAI's Sam Altman, SpaceXAI's Elon Musk and Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis each publicly agreed that same day, according to the AP. The lawsuit also alleges coordination began months earlier, citing a July 2026 statement in which senior employees from several leading labs acknowledged the 'intense competitive pressure not to unilaterally slow' development. Trump's intervention — and the backing his position has received from most Republicans — means any request for the government 'mediation' or the 'narrow waiver' Amodei said would be needed faces a hostile political environment.

According to The Next Web, the complaint is striking for a cartel case because it contains no leaked emails, confidential witnesses or meeting minutes: the alleged agreement was, in the complaint's own words, 'proposed in public, accepted in public, and confirmed in public.' Every factual source is a named executive's public statement or a press report, which makes the evidence easy to verify but also means no one tried to hide the alleged conduct. The pleading treats Amodei's essay as the offer and the rival executives' same-day responses as acceptance, and argues that debating the conduct's lawfulness is itself proof the companies understood it as coordination and proceeded anyway.

The Next Web's analysis of the filing flags several vulnerabilities. The complaint concedes that the full effect on released products has not yet manifested — no slowed release, canceled model or altered training run is identified anywhere in its twenty-nine pages. Its claimed 80% share of US paid subscriptions is pleaded on information and belief as a floor rather than a measurement. The four acceptances are not equivalent either: Musk's was four words on social media, and Google's endorsed a direction while leaving implementation open. The plaintiffs also plead the restraint as naked, which would make market definition unnecessary, offering a market only in the alternative.

The plaintiffs disclaim any challenge to unilateral slowing, independent evaluators, lawful safety research or petitioning Congress for an exemption — their argument is that antitrust law forbids substituting 'collective restraint for individual accountability.' The labs, meanwhile, face genuine safety pressure: TechSpot notes recent reports of agents breaching test environments and production systems, and Amodei has warned that rogue AI botnet swarms could threaten the internet within six to twelve months, potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.

No defendant has yet responded to the complaint, filed on September 18, and the companies have strong arguments that public advocacy and unilateral safety work are lawful, as The Next Web notes. Watch whether the labs' working group keeps meeting: the complaint alleges it was still meeting in mid-September, and continuing now would be read as continuing the conduct. Watch the political track too — Trump's new task force and 'AI czar' appointment could shape any federal framework, while Sen. In Europe, Article 101 of the EU treaty would impose a similar analysis in Brussels, though no case has been signaled.