After rival American Artificial Intelligence (AI) firms together called for slowing down the technology’s development to make it safer, a lawsuit has been filed against them, claiming they are violating antitrust laws.

What is antitrust, and why are Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google being sued for seemingly seeking safer AI?

What exactly are the four AI firms accused of?

The lawsuit, filed Friday (September 18) in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, has been brought by four people who pay for ChatGPT, Claude, Grok or Gemini, on behalf of a proposed nationwide class of other paid subscribers. The plaintiffs argue that the companies’ agreement to coordinate a slowdown violates antitrust law and could reduce the value consumers receive from their AI subscriptions. Antitrust laws function to promote fair competition among businesses and to prevent monopolies.

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The immediate trigger for the lawsuit was an essay published on September 12 by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. He argued that leading AI companies should cooperate to decelerate advances in AI capabilities and devote more time to safety. Amodei also suggested that the US government could facilitate such cooperation by granting a narrow antitrust waiver for certain safety discussions. On the same day, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk and Google DeepMind co-founder and chair Demis Hassabis publicly responded to Amodei’s proposals in agreement.

The plaintiffs also point to a July statement signed by senior employees from several leading AI laboratories. That statement acknowledged the competitive pressure companies face against unilaterally slowing development and called for government support for a global effort to slow automated AI development.

The plaintiffs’ argument is not that an AI company cannot decide to slow development. Rather, they say competing companies cannot collectively agree to restrain their development.

In simple terms, imagine four competing carmakers independently deciding that they want to introduce a safety feature before making their next generation of cars. That is different from the four companies agreeing among themselves that none of them will make faster cars for the next few years. The lawsuit argues that the latter arrangement can weaken competition.

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The plaintiffs contend that if the chief rivals agree that AI progress should be slower than it would otherwise be under competition, consumers could receive less valuable products or fewer improvements for the same subscription prices.

Why is this an antitrust issue?

One of the basic concerns antitrust laws address is the possibility that competitors could coordinate instead of competing independently.

On safety, the lawsuit says that antitrust laws forbid the firms from taking the “shortcut” of agreeing to “substitute collective restraint for individual accountability”, sand that a competitive market anyway allows for responsibility and genuine progress, as reported by AP.

“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,” Nick Rowley, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, was quoted as saying by AP.

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The lawsuit, thus, draws a distinction between safety regulation and collective restraint. Their objection is to the companies among themselves reaching an agreement that could restrain competition.

This is especially significant because these four AI companies are the world market leaders — not counting Chinese firms — of a fast-changing technology. Other AI players have argued that the collective call for regulation and slowing down could be their way of ensuring no one else catches up, and remains dependent on them.

For example, the French startup Mistral, one of Europe’s leading AI firms, has said in a statement, “Some incumbents are using this moment to consolidate their market position, pushing for regulation designed to ⁠favour them over competitors.”

Reuters quoted Raphael Auphan, chief operating officer of Swiss privacy software company Proton, as saying, “I think this is totally self-serving. They just want to preserve a dimension of dependency on their service.”

And where does the main regulator here stand?

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While the four AI companies have asked the government to step in, US President Donald Trump has taken a different position on calls for an AI slowdown.

Trump has repeatedly argued against additional regulation that could hinder the American AI industry. On September 19, he announced plans to appoint an “AI czar” and create an “AI force”, although he did not provide details.

In a social media post, Trump said the US would not “hinder or stifle” the growth of the AI industry. Instead, he said the administration would “cherish it, help it, and watch over it”, while relying on the existing criminal and civil justice system to deal with wrongdoing.

Trump has also argued that the US needs to maintain its lead over China in AI. His administration has stressed the importance of American AI companies competing with Chinese rivals, while Trump has rejected calls for additional AI regulation.