As per a report by Fortune, four paid subscribers to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Gemini sued Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI (the renamed xAI) and Google in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on September 19, seeking to represent a nationwide class of subscribers. The suit centers on September 12, when Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei published an essay urging the industry to coordinate on slowing the pace of frontier AI development for safety reasons, suggesting regulators could grant "a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations." OpenAI's Sam Altman, SpaceXAI's Elon Musk and Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis publicly endorsed the idea the same day.

The plaintiffs argue that informal coordination among competitors, done outside any government process, is an antitrust violation that reduces the value subscribers get for what they pay, regardless of the safety rationale offered. They say they do not object to the companies lobbying Congress or seeking a formal antitrust exemption — only to coordinating without one. Lead counsel Nick Rowley said in a statement that leaving AI safety "to be controlled by private self-serving agreements" risks letting the technology "spin out of human control."