AI Companies Face Class-Action Suit Over Alleged Development Pace Pact

Four paid subscribers filed a proposed nationwide class-action lawsuit in the Northern District of California accusing Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google of violating Section 1 of the Sherman Act by coordinating to slow the development and improvement of frontier AI products. The complaint argues that limiting model improvements could reduce the value of ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Gemini subscriptions and unlawfully restrain trade. The case follows Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s September 12 call to “pace the frontier” so safety testing could keep up, which OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk and Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis publicly supported. The companies have also discussed shared safety practices, including pre-release testing, audits and risk assessments, but characterize the cooperation as a safety effort rather than a commercial agreement. The plaintiffs argue that AI safeguards should be established transparently by governments, while Amodei has acknowledged antitrust concerns and suggested a narrow, government-facilitated waiver for safety discussions. The companies had not publicly responded to the allegations, leaving courts to determine whether the coordination constitutes legitimate safety collaboration or an unlawful restraint of competition.