A class action lawsuit filed in Northern California alleges that public calls to slow down model development hide an anticompetitive agreement between laboratories.
A complaint filed on Friday, September 19, 2026 in the Federal Court of the Northern District of California accuses Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google of having entered into an illegal agreement to block together the pace of development of their systems. The four complainants are paid customers of ChatGPT, Claude, Grok or Gemini; they feel they have been deprived of part of the value of their subscription.
The heart of the file is the day of September 12. Dario Amodei, Managing Director of Anthropic, published an essay calling on the sector to cooperate to decelerate for safety. On the same day, Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Demis Hassabi publicly responded by indicating their agreement. For the complainants, this convergence of timetables is not a coincidence.
The complaint goes further and is based on a statement of July 2026, signed by executives of several leading laboratories, who acknowledged that they were under "intensive competitive pressure not to slow down unilaterally." The legal argument is to re-qualify as an anti-competitive agreement what the sector presents as a safety debate.
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