On Friday (local time), a civil lawsuit was initiated in a federal court, accusing Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Google—key entities in the artificial intelligence arena—of conspiracy due to their recent push for coordinated efforts to decelerate the pace of AI research and development. The complaint highlighted that earlier this month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei publicly advocated for industry-wide coordination to regulate the speed of AI development at the cutting edge, a stance endorsed by SpaceXAI's leader Elon Musk, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis. Under US antitrust legislation, such conduct is deemed an unlawful business agreement among competitors.

Nick Rowley, one of the attorneys representing the four plaintiffs who brought the lawsuit in the Northern District of California, explained that the lawsuit's objective is to stop the world's most influential for-profit tech firms from forging self-interested private agreements that could swiftly strip AI of human oversight. In a statement, Rowley underscored that in the face of existential threats like nuclear war and the most significant risks confronting humanity today, there should be ironclad protective mechanisms in place. He emphasized that legal frameworks should be established by the government in a transparent and lawful manner, with accountability to the public.