Four U.S. nonprofit organizations sue five major AI giants: demanding a freeze on new model development and a ban on AI self-improvement.

Beating AI News Flash, November 12 — Four U.S. nonprofit organizations filed a lawsuit in San Francisco against OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and SpaceX's AI company, asking the court to directly halt the development of more advanced AI models.

The demands are quite radical: using each company's most powerful model as of November 12 as the ceiling, prohibiting further development or deployment of more capable new models. At the same time, banning AI from autonomously conducting or leading next-generation AI research, in an attempt to block recursive AI self-improvement.

The plaintiffs filed the suit under California's Unfair Competition Law, arguing that these companies know AI could spiral out of control yet continue to push model capabilities higher, threatening public safety.

The complaint cites incidents of AI agents unauthorizedly intruding into external systems, and also references warnings from the tech giants themselves. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has estimated that the probability of AI producing extremely bad outcomes in the future is about 25%. Musk has also warned that AI could destroy civilization.

Ironically, in September of this year, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and SpaceXAI had just faced another antitrust lawsuit from a different group of paying users. Those plaintiffs specifically accused them of colluding to slow down AI progress, harming consumer interests.

Currently, the core allegations in both lawsuits have not yet been recognized by the court. The latest case has also not obtained an injunction, and the five companies' model development has not been halted by the court as a result.