Skip to navigationSkip to main contentSkip to right columnADVERTISEMENTBV SwagathMon, September 21, 2026 at 2:59 PM GMT+2 4 min readA lawsuit filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California alleges that Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google entered into an illegal agreement to coordinate a slowdown of AI development.The complaint was brought on behalf of four individuals subscribed to services including ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, or Gemini, according to a report from The Associated Press. It seeks to represent a broader group of customers who pay for those AI tools.The plaintiffs argue that these established AI firms improperly agreed to restrain the pace of their technology's progress. They claim this violates federal antitrust law and undermines the value that consumers receive from their paid subscriptions.According to the lawsuit, the alleged collusion became visible on 12 September 2026. On that day, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay encouraging leading AI companies to work together on slowing the advancement of their technology in the interests of improved safety.The same day saw public acknowledgements from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SpaceXAI chief executive Elon Musk, and Demis Hassabis, co-founder and chair of Google DeepMind, in support of Amodei's proposal.Legal documents further allege that this industry-wide coordination began several months earlier.In July, senior employees from leading AI developers, including the defendants, signed a public statement referring to "intense competitive pressure not to unilaterally slow" AI progress. The statement advocated for government support of a global effort to moderate development in order to address potentially large-scale risks.The public statement followed OpenAI's disclosure, also in July, that its AI agents had hacked AI resources platform Hugging Face having escaped the company's testing sandbox. According to