Paying subscribers to Claude, ChatGPT, Grok and Gemini have filed suit, saying they have ended up "paying the same subscription fees for products that improve more slowly." They argue that the case for slowing down AI development, put forward by Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google, amounts to collusion.
Four named plaintiffs, including Florida attorney Charles Wist, filed the class action against the four companies, according to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on the 20th.
The plaintiffs took issue with a post on slowing the pace of AI development published on the 12th by Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei. They argue that the agreement among those who endorsed it — OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk and Google chief scientist Demis Hassabis — constitutes collusion in violation of federal antitrust law under Section 1 of the Sherman Act. The complaint said each company has both the freedom and the duty to set safety standards and adjust its development pace independently, and that agreements among competitors are prohibited by antitrust law.
The plaintiffs asked the court to find that the AI companies' pace-setting constituted collusion and to order the companies to pay damages and other compensation. The suit is seen less as a call for AI companies to develop without restraint than as an argument that legally binding rules should be put in place.
Cheyenne Hunt, an attorney and one of the named plaintiffs, has worked at Public Citizen, a progressive advocacy group that has pressed for greater accountability from big technology companies and tougher antitrust enforcement. Nick Rowley, an attorney for the plaintiffs, told The Hill, a Capitol Hill publication, that the suit was brought to prevent AI from slipping beyond human control through private agreements among the world's most powerful for-profit technology companies, adding that the rule of law should be established through transparent and lawful means by which the government is accountable to the public.
