AI Companies Face Antitrust Lawsuit Over Slowdown Calls

Sep 21, 2026
A civil lawsuit accuses Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX AI and Google of illegally coordinating efforts to slow AI development. The plaintiffs seek to represent paid subscribers who they claim would receive less value from the companies' services.
AI Companies Face Antitrust Lawsuit Over Slowdown Calls
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Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX AI and Google face a civil lawsuit alleging that calls to slow AI development amounted to illegal coordination between competitors, according to Politico. The lawsuit was filed September 18 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

The complaint centers on Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's September 12 essay calling for industrywide coordination to pace frontier AI development. The plaintiffs say public statements of agreement from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SpaceX AI head Elon Musk and Google DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis formed an anticompetitive agreement.

Four named plaintiffs who pay for ChatGPT, Claude, Grok or Gemini subscriptions seek to represent a nationwide class of paid subscribers. They claim coordinated limits on AI progress would reduce the value of those subscriptions. The four companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

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