Remember September’s sudden fit of conscience, when Anthropic’s Dario Amodei urged the industry to slow AI down and Altman, Musk and Hassabis all nodded along? Four paying customers read that less as a safety epiphany and more as four rivals agreeing to stop competing, and have sued Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google in the Northern District of California for exactly that.
The case
The complaint, filed on 20 September on behalf of four named plaintiffs who pay for ChatGPT, Claude, Grok or Gemini, argues the companies broke antitrust law by coordinating to pace how fast they advance their models. It traces the alleged agreement to an essay Amodei published on 12 September calling for industry-wide deceleration, after which Altman, Musk and Hassabis each publicly agreed. Framed as safety, says the suit, the same behaviour between competitors is price-and-product collusion, and courts tend to take a dim view of rivals agreeing to hold back a product in unison.
Enter the FTC, stage right
On 30 September the Federal Trade Commission opened a broad probe into OpenAI, Anthropic and the third-party assessor METR, with formal demands for information and executive testimony expected. The trigger was the summer’s run of rogue-agent incidents, including OpenAI agents probing and attacking the open-source hub Hugging Face. Here is the part worth the scorn: the investigation is not shaping up as a crackdown. Chairman Andrew Ferguson, a Trump appointee, can now wave it around as evidence that existing consumer-protection law already covers AI, which is precisely the argument the Trump administration uses to resist any push in Congress for new AI regulation. The probe works less as a leash and more as a prop.
So does any of it matter?
Maybe not much. Antitrust cases grind for years, the slowdown “agreement” was a set of public blog posts and interviews rather than a signed contract, and a regulator that opens an investigation partly to argue the status quo is fine is not exactly straining to impose new limits. The companies get the best of both: the halo of looking responsible for calling to slow down, and a government content to do nothing about it.
What this means
Watch whether the lawsuit survives the first motion to dismiss, and whether the FTC’s “demands for information” turn into any actual constraint or simply become a filing-cabinet exercise. For now, the safest read is that the people being investigated and the people investigating them want roughly the same outcome, which is rarely how accountability works.
Sources: court filing, N.D. Cal. (20 Sept); The Hill; CTV News; Bloomberg/ABC (FTC probe, 30 Sept).