Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI and Google sued over alleged AI slowdown pact

Four paid users of ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Gemini have filed a proposed class action against Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI and Google, claiming the rivals agreed to slow improvements to their AI systems. The complaint points especially to a September 12 call by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei for industry-wide coordination to moderate the pace of progress for safety, followed by public support from leaders at the other companies; it also cites an earlier staff statement about the difficulty of slowing down alone. The legal theory is not that a company cannot make its own systems safer or move more cautiously. It is that competitors cannot jointly hold back product development, since customers could get less improvement for the same paid subscriptions. The claims have not been proven in court.