AI companies violated antitrust law with agreement to slow pace of development, lawsuit says
OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and SpaceXAI are being sued, with plaintiffs alleging the companies broke antitrust laws by coordinating to slow down the pace of artificial intelligence development.
Last Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, in an essay called “We Must Pace the Frontier,” warned that AI carries serious risks, including loss of control, misuse in cyberattacks and bioterrorism and economic disruption.
“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” Amodei wrote. He said frontier AI companies should coordinate “to establish common safety standards as well as limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress.”
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SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Google DeepMind co-founder and chair Demis Hassabis, and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, offered support for the idea.
In the lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Friday, plaintiffs said “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.”
“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,” plaintiffs said in the filing, which was obtained by Bloomberg Law. Plaintiffs noted the agreement was “proposed in public, accepted in public, and confirmed in public.”
While plaintiffs said in the suit they take AI safety seriously and the technology should have guardrails, these should not be decided by the companies, they argued, “but by we the people, through state and federal regulation, and through the voices of juries in our communities.”
“Plaintiffs recognize that powerful technology carries real risks, and they take those risks
seriously,” the lawsuit said. “But the lesson of every previous transformative industry is that safety and responsibility are properly the work of each company acting on its own, not a cartel license.”
The plaintiffs argued that other companies, such as automobile manufacturers, do not need a “horizontal agreement” to put in safety protocols, such as not letting passenger vehicles accelerate to 300 miles per hour. Instead, they said, the manufacturers adhere to “engineering constraints, internal safety standards, product-liability exposure, government regulation through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and basic competitive self-interest.”
“Each Defendant is free, and indeed obligated, to set its own safety thresholds, retain its own evaluators, build its own product guardrails, and restrain its own development,” the lawsuit states. “None of that requires an agreement with rivals.”
Antitrust laws, the plaintiffs argued, don’t let competitors decide among themselves “that compe-
tition is too dangerous.”
“Whether frontier AI should develop more slowly is a question for each company acting alone, or for Congress and the agencies. It is not a question that four competitors may answer together,” the lawsuit said. “The law leaves each Defendant free to be as cautious, as responsible, and as environmentally conscious as it chooses to be, just not through agreement with the companies it competes against.”
Straight Arrow reached out to Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceXAI for comment.
AI has been a hot topic among those on Capitol Hill — so far, though, Congress hasn’t agreed on a path forward.
Democratic lawmakers are urging their colleagues to move faster.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., says lawmakers shouldn’t leave Washington for another recess without acting on AI.
“These new models are scary. We’re dealing here with real peril, not science fiction. And so there should be an urgency,” he said. “We’re way past trusting big tech; that era of voluntary self-regulation is gone. We need a regimen of oversight, much as we do with pharmaceutical drugs or other potential dangers. And we need to do it now.”
Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, meanwhile, said Congress shouldn’t rush into new AI restrictions.
“[AI companies] can self-regulate. They don’t need the government to tell them to slow it down. If they want to slow it down, they should,” Johnson told reporters Tuesday, according to Reuters. He argued this would make the U.S. lose its competitive edge against China.
Instead, he said, “I think you need independent auditors. I think you need transparency from the people who are developing this.”
President Donald Trump said Saturday he intends to form an “AI Force,” as well as appoint an “AI czar.”
“We will not in any way hinder or stifle the Growth of this incredible Industry. Rather, we will cherish it, help it, and watch over it, as it grows!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “However, we will also be looking for BAD, and we can do that, very easily, with our already existing Criminal and Civil Justice System. For this purpose, I am forming the AI Force, much like I did Space Force.”