🇺🇸OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google face a federal antitrust lawsuit alleging collusion over calls to coordinate slower AI development.

The reported case is a civil lawsuit, not a finding of antitrust liability. Telegram reports citing Politico say the complaint was filed on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, on behalf of four plaintiffs. In addition to the three companies in the digest, the reports name SpaceXAI, using that designation for the defendant associated with Elon Musk.

The complaint centers on public calls for coordination among competing AI companies. It alleges that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called earlier in the month for industry-wide coordination to slow or pace frontier-AI development. According to the complaint as reported, Musk, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis expressed agreement.

The alleged illegality is the plaintiffs’ characterization of those exchanges. The complaint argues that they amount to an unlawful commercial agreement between competitors under U.S. antitrust law. Plaintiffs’ attorney Nick Rowley said the case seeks to prevent self-interested private agreements and argued that rules should instead be established transparently and lawfully by government.

Separate reporting documents objections from European companies to slower-development proposals. Mistral AI criticized what it described as incumbent-favoring regulation, while Proton and Black Forest Labs representatives also questioned the proposals. These statements are company representatives’ positions, not evidence that the lawsuit’s allegations have been adjudicated.