AI giants like Anthropic and OpenAI face collusion allegations for calling for a slowdown in AI development.

Beating AI News Flash: According to a civil lawsuit filed in federal court on Friday, AI giants Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX AI, and Google are facing conspiracy allegations over recent calls to coordinate a slowdown in AI development.

The complaint alleges that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei publicly called earlier this month for "industry-wide coordination" to "set the pace for the frontier," and that the endorsement of SpaceXAI head Elon Musk, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis amounted to an illegal business agreement among competitors under U.S. antitrust law.

Nick Rowley, one of the lawyers representing four plaintiffs in the lawsuit filed in the Northern District of California, said the case aims to ensure that private, self-serving agreements among the world's most powerful for-profit tech companies do not cause AI to "rapidly spiral beyond human control." When it comes to existential threats such as nuclear war and what is now the greatest risk in human history, humanity deserves ironclad safeguards. The rule of law should be established transparently, lawfully, and accountably to the public by the U.S. government.