Paid ChatGPT and Claude users sue labs over the Sept. 12 slowdown
Four paying ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Gemini subscribers sued Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Google on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Fortune reports with the Associated Press. The complaint ties the case to a Sept. 12 public slowdown chorus, when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging industrywide deceleration for safety and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, SpaceXAI’s Elon Musk, and Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis each publicly agreed.
The suit argues the firms violated antitrust laws, the rules against rival companies illegally coordinating to hurt competition, by agreeing to go slower than competition would otherwise force. That deal, the plaintiffs say, reduces the value of paid AI subscriptions. Lawyers seek a proposed nationwide class action, one suit meant to cover a large group of similar paid subscribers.
The CEOs asked Washington for safety room. Paying customers called the same handshake a cartel.
Lead attorney Nick Rowley said AI “will quickly spin out of human control and could kill us all if we allow AI safety and protocol … to be controlled by private self-serving agreements between the world’s most powerful ‘for profit’ technology companies.”
Amodei’s essay already flagged the antitrust risk. He wrote that it would help for the U.S. government to mediate or at least enable cross-lab talks, and that Washington would need to “issue a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations,” a limited permission to discuss safety without that talk itself becoming an illegal agreement.
Altman welcomed a “federal framework that sets consistent safety requirements” but said OpenAI does “not believe we need to wait for an anti-trust exemption or legislation to begin the work.”
Representatives for Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and SpaceXAI did not immediately respond Saturday.