A lawsuit has been filed in California accusing leading tech companies SpaceX SPCX, Google GOOG GOOGL, Anthropic ANTHROPIC, and OpenAI OPENAI of illegally collaborating to slow down the pace of their respective AI efforts.
The coordination largely took place on Sept. 12, the lawsuit argues, when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging for industrywide cooperation on decelerating advancements in favor of enhanced safety measures. That same day, OpenAI's Sam Altman, SpaceXAI's Elon Musk, and Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis each publicly responded to Amodei's proposals in agreement.
It's clear that an agreement among the chief rivals in AI that their progress “should be slower than competition would otherwise produce has an anticompetitive effect on consumers,” the plaintiffs argue.
“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,” said Nick Rowley, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs.
Representatives for Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and SpaceXAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday.
In his initial essay proposing the slowdown, Amodei acknowledged potential antitrust challenges, writing that it would be helpful for the US government to mediate “or at least enable” these cross-lab discussions. The government wouldn't need to participate, he wrote, but would need to “issue a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations.”
In response, Altman said on social media that OpenAI welcomes the idea of a “federal framework that sets consistent safety requirements,” but said, “We do not believe we need to wait for an antitrust exemption or legislation to begin the work of providing this confidence.”
While the recent conversations about pacing development were spurred by increasing concerns about AI evading human control, several leaders in the AI space have long talked about developing a shared set of standards or otherwise coordinating to ensure safety efforts remained paramount.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.DisclaimerContent provided by Seeking Alpha is intended for information purposes only, and that Seeking Alpha does not offer any personalist investment advice and is not a licensed securities dealer, broker, US investment adviser or investment bank.
