Four Subscribers Sue Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google Over a Safety Pact
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Four Subscribers Sue Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google Over a Safety Pact
The suit, filed Sept. 18 in San Francisco, treats the four companies' public agreement to slow AI development as an illegal restraint of trade rather than a safety measure.
Four paying subscribers to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok or Gemini sued Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google on Sept. 18 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, arguing the companies' public agreement to slow AI development violates antitrust law.
The named plaintiffs are Charles Buist and Nick Spetsas of Florida and Cheyenne Hunt and Christine Bullock of California, each suing individually and on behalf of a proposed nationwide class of paid subscribers. Lead counsel is Nicholas C. Rowley, joined by Andrew T. Tutt, R. Stanton Jones and Jakob Z. Norman of Trial Lawyers for Justice, according to PBS NewsHour's report on the filing.
What the companies actually did on Sept. 12
The complaint centers on Sept. 12, when Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei published an essay titled "We Must Pace the Frontier," arguing the industry should deliberately slow capability gains by one to two years so safety work can catch up. Amodei's proposal had three parts: embedded, independent evaluators inside frontier labs; coordination among companies based in democratic countries; and eventually an international agreement that includes China.
Within hours, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, SpaceXAI's Elon Musk and Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis each publicly endorsed the proposal, per PBS NewsHour and the Washington Examiner's coverage of the essay's reception. The essay landed five days after OpenAI published its own three-track system for disclosing model misalignment, a separate move toward the same kind of self-policing Amodei's essay proposed for the industry as a whole. Anthropic followed through six days later: on Sept. 18, it announced a partnership with Accenture in which the two companies said they would invest at least $1 billion over five years so Accenture's Faculty division could run independent red-teaming and alignment assessments of Anthropic's models, a step Anthropic's own announcement ties directly to Amodei's essay.
| Defendant | Executive named in the suit | Sept. 12 action alleged |
|---|---|---|
| Anthropic PBC | Dario Amodei | Published "We Must Pace the Frontier" |
| OpenAI OpCo LLC | Sam Altman | Publicly endorsed the essay same day |
| SpaceXAI LLC | Elon Musk | Publicly endorsed the essay same day |
| Google LLC | Demis Hassabis | Publicly endorsed the essay same day |
The legal theory
The complaint pleads a single count under Section 1 of the Sherman Act, framed primarily as a per-se unlawful restraint and, in the alternative, under quick-look and full rule-of-reason analysis. It seeks treble damages under the Clayton Act, an injunction against further horizontal agreements on the pace of AI development, and a jury trial, according to PBS NewsHour's account of the filing.
The suit does not challenge any company's individual decision to slow its own work. Its claim, as PBS NewsHour paraphrased it, is that the four companies took the "shortcut" of substituting collective restraint for individual accountability, and that doing so lets each company reduce the value subscribers get from a paid plan without losing customers to a faster rival, since every major rival agreed to the same pace at once.
What the companies have said
Altman told reporters covering the essay's reception that OpenAI welcomes "a federal framework that sets consistent safety requirements," but that "we do not believe we need to wait for an antitrust exemption or legislation" before doing safety work, a position Amodei's own essay anticipated by proposing that regulators issue a narrow waiver for safety-related conversations between labs. None of the four defendants had filed a response in the docket or issued a statement on the lawsuit itself as of PBS NewsHour's Sept. 20 report.
The case's next milestone is whichever defendant moves first, either to dismiss the antitrust claim or to answer the complaint; none had done so as of this writing. The underlying safety argument is separate from the antitrust one: a study finding AI chatbots wrong on financial questions most of the time is the kind of capability gap Amodei's essay cites as a reason to slow down, whatever a court decides about how four companies agreed to do it.
Sources
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