'AI could kill us...': Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, Google face lawsuit over 'agreement' on slowdown

Amid calls for artificial intelligence (AI) slowdown, a new lawsuit claims Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google made an illegal deal to slow the pace of their respective AI development. The lawsuit was filed Friday (Sep 20) in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, argues that the leading AI companies violated antitrust laws when they agreed to coordinate slowdown efforts, and that doing so would reduce the value consumers get for paid AI subscriptions. Lawyers representing four named plaintiffs, who pay for subscriptions to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok or Gemini, are bringing the lawsuit on behalf of a proposed nationwide class of other paid subscribers to those services.

The coordination largely took place on Sept. 12, the lawsuit argues, when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging for 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’s co-founder and chair Demis Hassabis each publicly responded to Amodei’s proposals in agreement.

But the lawsuit also alleges that the coordination began to take shape months earlier. It points to a statement from July 2026 that high-ranking employees from several of the leading AI labs signed that acknowledged the “intense competitive pressure not to unilaterally slow” development. That statement called on the government to support a global effort to slow automated AI development. It is clear 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,” the plaintiffs argue.

The plaintiffs don’t object to the companies individually deciding to slow their own progress in favor of safety. They instead argue in the complaint that antitrust laws forbid them from taking the “shortcut” of agreeing to “substitute collective restraint for individual accountability.” A competitive market allows for responsibility and genuine progress, the lawsuit argues. “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,” said Nick Rowley, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs.

Also Read: 'Nobody knows if it can be in control': ‘Godfather’ of AI, China spy chief back AI slowdown calls

Trump criticised calls to slow AI

US President Donald Trump and China downplayed the concerns. While Trump called it a “hoax” like climate change, China called it “fearmongering.” Trump went on to declare “whoever wins AI, wins,” Trump told reporters at his golf club in Doonbeg, Ireland, ”We can put guardrails, and we can do this and that, but I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up and they’re bringing up things that won’t happen,” he added. “The only “guardrails” that AI needed were a “STRONG AND SMART” president,” he opined on Truth Social. Meanwhile, China’s ministry of foreign affairs said that all parties should work together on AI. “Fearmongering, confrontation and vicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance, which serves no one’s interest,” spokesperson Guo Jiakun said at a press conference on Monday. The debate around AI was reignited after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei proposed a three-part plan aimed at controlling the pace of frontier AI development. He argued that AI systems were becoming capable of helping create more advanced models, raising concerns about how quickly the technology could progress.