Filed September 18, 2026 in U.S. District Court, Northern District of California.
Complaint alleges four frontier AI companies — Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Google — agreed to slow the pace at which each improves competing consumer products, violating Sherman Act Section 1.
Key allegations: Amodei’s September 12, 2026 essay proposed “industry-wide coordination” to set “limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress”; Musk, Altman, and Hassabis publicly accepted; OpenAI’s Chris Lehane confirmed weeks of pre-essay collaboration with Anthropic and Google DeepMind.
Relief sought: class certification for paid ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok subscribers; injunction; treble damages for reduced subscription value.
Note: These are unproven legal allegations. Defendants have not admitted wrongdoing in court filings reviewed here.