Key points
- Four subscribers sue Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Google
- Claim: an illegal deal to slow AI down
- The alleged proof is mostly public essays
- Only Alphabet (GOOGL) is publicly traded
Four people who pay for AI subscriptions have sued the companies building it, not because they think the race is too fast, but because they say the labs agreed to slow it down together.
The class action, Buist v. Anthropic, was filed September 18 in federal court in Northern California. It names Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Google. The plaintiffs say the companies coordinated to decelerate AI, violating Section 1 of the Sherman Act.
Their argument: an agreement to move slower than competition would otherwise force the labs to move harms paying users. The proposed class includes subscribers to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Gemini.
Their lead lawyer, Nick Rowley, has put the case in much bigger terms. He told The Associated Press that AI could "quickly spin out of human control and could kill us all" if safety is controlled by "private self-serving agreements between the world's most powerful 'for profit' technology companies."
What they're actually pointing to
Here's the problem for the plaintiffs: the evidence they lay out is mostly public. On September 12, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging the industry to slow AI down for safety. Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Demis Hassabis each backed parts of that approach in public. The suit also points to a July statement from senior lab staff that acknowledged the "intense competitive pressure not to unilaterally slow" development and called for government help with coordination.
That is a striking set of facts.
The hard part of the case
The plaintiffs do not object to one company slowing down on its own, or to the labs asking Washington to make rules. Their narrower claim is that the four agreed together to hold back. The complaint calls that a "shortcut" that would "substitute collective restraint for individual accountability."
Alphabet (GOOGL), Google's parent company, is the only publicly traded company connected to a defendant. Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceXAI are private, and the suit is at an early stage. The complaint raises a new allegation to watch, but it does not establish that the companies reached an agreement.
