Cartel collusion in AI – what the authors of ChatGPT and Claude are accused of

An antitrust lawsuit has been filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California against leading AI developers. The plaintiffs accuse the companies of secret collusion and artificially slowing down the pace of technological development. The trigger was public statements by industry leaders about synchronously reducing development rates for safety reasons.

A massive class-action antitrust lawsuit has been filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California against leading American artificial intelligence developers. The lawsuit was initiated by four users who pay for subscriptions to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Gemini, who intend to represent the interests of a broader group of American consumers. The plaintiffs accuse the companies of secret collusion and artificially slowing down the pace of technological progress, which, in their view, reduces the value of paid subscriptions and violates competition laws. The catalyst for the proceedings was the events of September 12, when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei publicly called on key AI labs to synchronously reduce development rates to implement additional safety protocols. This idea was supported by Sam Altman (OpenAI), Elon Musk (SpaceXAI), and Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind). The plaintiffs emphasize that they do not object to a single company slowing down its work independently, but consider collective agreements among competitors to be illegal. The technology companies have so far refrained from commenting, although Amodei previously acknowledged the existence of antitrust risks.