Antitrust Lawsuit Challenges AI Labs' Safety Coordination
2026-09-18 ยท Governance
Four paid subscribers sued Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Google, alleging that coordinated commitments to slow AI development amount to an illegal agreement among competitors.
The proposed class action, Buist et al. v. Anthropic PBC et al., was filed on September 18 in the Northern District of California. It centers on Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's September 12 essay, "We Must Pace the Frontier," which called for industry-wide coordination to slow the pace of AI capability gains, and on public statements of agreement from the heads of OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Google DeepMind. The plaintiffs allege that each company may slow its own work, but that agreeing to slow together restrains competition under the Sherman Act. No class has been certified, and the claims are unproven.
Amodei's essay had said such coordination would need a narrow antitrust waiver for certain safety conversations. On September 15, Senator Josh Hawley, backed by Senator Ted Cruz, blocked an antitrust exemption in the National Defense Authorization Act. A separate bipartisan bill introduced in July, the Collaboration on Adversarial Threats and Security Risks Act, would create a limited exemption for sharing security information.
For SIRDA, this is the cartel question in court. The case tests where legitimate safety coordination among the most powerful developers ends and restraint of competition begins, and whether any procedure other than private agreement can authorize a collective slowdown.