AI Companies Sued Over Alleged Pact to Slow Development

A new lawsuit filed on Sept. 18 alleged that Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Google formed a pact to slow how fast their competing AI technologies would improve.

Plaintiffs in the lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, say they paid for subscriptions on the promise of benefiting from new upgrades and feel duped over an alleged coordinated slowdown that would cut the quality of Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, and/or Gemini.

“The value of those subscriptions consists of access to Defendants’ most capable models and to the improvements Defendants continually release,” the complaint reads.

“Defendants market and price those subscriptions on exactly that basis. An agreement that slows improvement lowers the quality of what subscribers receive for the price they pay.” 

The lawsuit was filed less than a week after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for a slowdown of AI development. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk, and Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis voiced support for Amodei’s suggestion.

But plaintiffs say AI rivals cannot lawfully agree among themselves to slow the speed at which competing products improve.

“An agreement among competitors to reduce the quality of their products and the rate at which those products improve is an agreement to restrict output,” the lawsuit claims. “It is among the restraints Section 1 of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1, has always condemned, and it does not become lawful because the products are new.”

The Sherman Act bans contracts, combinations, or conspiracies that restrain trade. Its purpose is to protect the process of competition for the benefit of consumers, so companies “operate efficiently, keep prices down, and keep quality up,” according to the Federal Trade Commission.

The plaintiffs don’t take issue with companies taking extra time to be safe, but they argue that each firm—or Congress—should decide its own pace and not be held to an alleged agreement with competitors that impacts customers, who expect upgrades.

The Epoch Times contacted Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Google for comment but did not hear back from any of the companies by time of publication.

President Donald Trump said on Sept. 19 that he will form an Artificial Intelligence Force to help boost the industry’s growth.

“I am forming the AI Force, much like I did Space Force, which has been a tremendous SUCCESS, in my First Term,” Trump said in a Truth Social post.

Trump suggested over the weekend that he wants to rename “artificial intelligence” to Superior Intelligence, Extreme Intelligence, or Supreme Intelligence.

Supreme Intelligence was in the running until Trump walked it back in a Truth Social post on Sept. 20, after taking a poll on the platform in which the term didn’t get a lot of support. Trump wrote that this was “probably because of its relationship to the Supreme Court.”