Consumers sue Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google over alleged AI pacing pact

Four consumers filed a class-action complaint in federal court in San Francisco on September 18, 2026, accusing Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google of agreeing among themselves to slow the pace at which their competing frontier AI products improve, in violation of federal antitrust law.

What the Complaint Alleges

The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Francisco Division, by Charles Buist and Nick Spetsas of Florida and Cheyenne Hunt and Christine Bullock of California, each suing individually and on behalf of a proposed nationwide class. It names Anthropic PBC, a San Francisco-based public benefit corporation; OpenAI OpCo LLC; SpaceXAI LLC; and Google LLC as defendants, describing the four as the companies at the frontier of artificial intelligence.

The filing asserts a violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act, the federal statute that prohibits contracts, combinations and conspiracies in restraint of trade. Its central theory is that an agreement among rivals to reduce the quality of their products and the rate at which those products improve is an agreement to restrict output, and that such a restraint does not become lawful because the products are new. The plaintiffs plead the restraint as unlawful per se and, in the alternative, under quick-look and rule-of-reason analysis.

The plaintiffs state in the filing that they take AI safety seriously but believe guardrails should be set by the public through state and federal regulation and through juries, rather than by the defendants. They expressly do not challenge any defendant’s unilateral decisions about safety, testing, environmental impact, or the pace of its own development, and they do not challenge the companies’ advocacy to Congress or the White House.

Nicholas C. Rowley is lead counsel for the plaintiffs, joined by Andrew T. Tutt, R. Stanton Jones and Jakob Z. Norman of Trial Lawyers for Justice, a firm with offices in West Hollywood, Decorah and Casper.

The Timeline in the Filing

The complaint alleges the coordination began months before the public exchange of September 12, 2026. Representatives of Anthropic, OpenAI and Google formed a working group in July 2026 that met regularly to work on creating a standards body for the industry, the filing states, and on July 14, 2026, Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis publicly proposed a U.S.-led standards body for frontier AI modeled in part on the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.

According to the filing, OpenAI published an essay by its chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, titled “An Alien Mind” on September 6, 2026, which described coordination among frontier developers to slow future development as one of the principal options available. The complaint also cites a September 10, 2026, WIRED report that OpenAI had sought guidance from members of Congress on whether coordinating an industry-wide slowdown could violate antitrust law, and a September 11, 2026, Fortune interview in which OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he thought a common industry plan would happen while declining to detail private discussions.

According to the complaint, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published the essay We Must Pace the Frontier on the morning of September 12, 2026. In it, he writes: “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models.” The filing alleges that within about an hour, Elon Musk, who founded and controls SpaceXAI’s Grok business, publicly endorsed the proposal; that Altman wrote he agreed with Amodei and committed OpenAI to the plan’s first step; and that Hassabis publicly endorsed the essay’s direction and tied it to the industry-wide standards body he had proposed in July.

On September 14, 2026, Altman stated that AI progress would proceed more slowly than it otherwise could and that OpenAI would not wait for an antitrust exemption or legislation before beginning the work with colleagues across the industry, the filing alleges. On September 15, 2026, OpenAI Global Policy Chief Chris Lehane confirmed that OpenAI had been working with Anthropic and Google DeepMind on the issues for several weeks.

The Essay and Statement Behind the Case

Amodei’s essay proposed three steps: embedded third-party evaluators with employee-like access to models and training pipelines, a measure Anthropic unilaterally committed to adopt; coordination among frontier AI companies in democratic countries to establish common safety standards and limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress; and global coordination extending to authoritarian governments where possible. A footnote concedes the second step depends on government mediation or antitrust waivers, and the essay urges companies to work together voluntarily in parallel with any government action.

The filing also traces the alleged agreement to a July 2026 statement titled Pacing the Frontier, published by employees of frontier AI companies with organizational support from the nonprofits Guidelight AI Standards and Encode AI. The statement carried 1,386 signatories, including Amodei, Anthropic co-founders Jared Kaplan and Jack Clark, OpenAI’s Pachocki and chief research officer Mark Chen, and Google DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg. The signatories described an “intense competitive pressure not to unilaterally slow” capability development and asked the U.S. government to support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace frontier AI development.

Market Definition, and Relief

The complaint defines a U.S. market for paid consumer subscriptions to general-purpose frontier generative-AI assistants, covering the paid tiers of ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Gemini, and alleges on information and belief that the four defendants collectively account for at least 80 percent of paid consumer subscriptions in that market. It notes that OpenAI’s ChatGPT Plus tier is priced at approximately $20 per month.

The plaintiffs’ injury theory is that subscriptions are marketed and priced on access to each company’s most capable models and continuing improvements, so an agreement slowing improvement lowers the quality subscribers receive for the price they pay, which the filing describes as an overcharge of the kind antitrust law was enacted to prevent. Buist, Hunt and Spetsas each allege they purchased paid subscriptions to Claude, ChatGPT, Grok and Gemini; Bullock subscribed to Claude.

The proposed nationwide class covers all persons in the United States who, from September 12, 2026, through the end of the alleged conduct’s effects, purchased a paid individual consumer subscription to one of the four services directly from a defendant, with separate subclasses for each company’s subscribers.

The plaintiffs seek treble damages under the Clayton Act and, under a separate provision of that statute, an injunction barring each defendant from entering into, maintaining, enforcing, or monitoring any horizontal agreement concerning the rate at which competing AI products are developed, improved, trained, or released; limits on training compute or training runs; coordinated release delays; capability checkpoints; or exchanges of competitively sensitive information to police such a restraint. The filing states the plaintiffs do not seek to prohibit independent safety measures, independent slowing, lawful safety research, compliance with government requirements, petitioning of government, or legitimate standard-setting. The complaint demands a trial by jury.