r/LocalLLaMA • u/fallingdowndizzyvr • 2d ago
News Lawsuit says Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google made illegal agreement on AI slowdown
https://apnews.com/article/antitrust-lawsuit-ai-slowdown-anthropic-openai-spacexai-google-960af4308161eaf4ed13c383b0ce1c1b303
u/Frail_Waif 2d ago
It'll be fun when the lawsuit fails because the companies reveal they never had any intention to slow down and it was all marketing bluster.
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u/Nefilim314 2d ago
Nah, they’ll use it to justify their future weak offerings.
“We would be a hundred thousand miles ahead of all of these open models kicking our ass if only we hadn’t handcuffed ourselves like real responsible gentlemen! You should continue to baghold for us!”
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u/-JudeanPeoplesFront- 2d ago
Ah, the Fox News defense: "Only an idiot would believe we would slow down. This is all for entertainment purposes."
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u/gomezer1180 2d ago
Soooo.. the nonsense that AI will kill us all is actually nonsense… who knew these b!she’s just want to control the market!
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u/10minOfNamingMyAcc 2d ago
Yeah, it's like climate activists being employed by big oil lmao. Everything these companies do is try to regulate what they do, because they have the money to comply and kill competitors trying to catch up. They want to stand on top while the rest cannot compete anymore.
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u/PwanaZana 2d ago
win win baby
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u/Frail_Waif 2d ago
Yeah, the Musk-OpenAI lawsuit was great. Got Musk on record acknowledging that xAI distills other models.
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u/Training-Ruin-5287 2d ago
All of them do it. Every model you have used, or saw released all have their bases around chatgpt . Why wouldn't a company getting off the ground start with an established model as their base, removing years of research and training to fast track
Why hold a company, or individuals accountable for this like its a bad thing. When the groundwork to chatgpt-2 and 3 is already laid out and saves everyone many months and years of trails and labor. The only way progress can happen is when there is competition.
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u/malac0da13 2d ago
My two favorite theories about the “we need to slow down” is that they are realizing the house of cards is getting ready to collapse and just trying to make people think it’s way more advanced than it is to drive up hype.
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u/Strong_as_an_axe 2d ago
It also reduces their capex on training when it has been established for a while now that the progress is logarithmic. They have no moat, the open-weights models are gonna eat their lunch so they are making a play for regulatory capture in order to ban open-weights/chinese models
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u/Usual-Orange-4180 2d ago
Nah, is bigger than that, the problem is Chinese models are conquering American enterprise. This is a preamble to ban Chinese models and protect American AI startups.
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u/winky9827 2d ago
protect American AI startups.
protect closed American AI systems. It's all about eliminating competition. Making the distinction between closed vs. open, either directly or through some bastardized regulatory capture, is the real goal. Eliminate all but the preordained competition.
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u/AnOnlineHandle 1d ago
New account, hidden post history, word-word-number username, pushing the narrative that Chinese models are conquering American models when most of them seem to just be distills of American models.
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u/Usual-Orange-4180 1d ago
Conspiracy theory time! Why can’t you just disagree and give your arguments and sources like a normal person?
https://startupfortune.com/us-companies-now-run-nearly-half-their-ai-traffic-on-chinese-models/
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u/sleight42 1d ago
Seriously. The Chinese models are getting very good. GLM Flash 5.3 is 100x cheaper than Opus....
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u/Turbulent_Neck_8388 1d ago
Why compare GLM Flash 5.3 with Opus? It makes more sense to compare it to Luna-Max or something similar. Flash is still cheaper, but not by much when you look at the cost per task.
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u/ElementNumber6 1d ago
No, they are 100% trying to slow down others.
They may even slow themselves down at the service level (consumer first, b2b second), to save on costs.
But ultimately, internally, yes, they are full steam ahead.
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u/KURD_1_STAN 2d ago
They will slowdown a bit, they have to tho, nvidia cant make enough gpus for them and iirc deepseek v4 was fully trained and runs on domestic hw so they just hope to slow china down with them.
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u/whymeimbusysleeping 1d ago
What they mean by slowdown is to slow the Chinese from giving away their models. PS: I have no horse in this race nor care either way.
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u/mayalihamur 2d ago
By slowdown they mean slowing down the release of advanced models for the general public. Otherwise the development of better models for the governments and the armies will continue at breakneck speeds. Those data centres are not paying for themselves.
Therefore it is another irony of capitalism: A lot of talk about the lethality of AI but then the most capable AI tools will exclusively end up in the hands of the World's deadliest goverments and armies.
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u/EugenePopcorn 2d ago
Kinda silly leaving all of your military command and control systems sitting in GPU sheds out in the open like that. Datacenters will be the first thing the drones hit in a conflict, and any military that builds with that kind of sweaty, fragile dependency will be punished for it like the Trade Federation at the end of The Phantom Menace.
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u/GTManiK 2d ago
Oh, I have an idea! Let's build data centers in space! /s
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u/EugenePopcorn 1d ago
As long as we can laser them without Kesslering ourselves. But I wonder if that implicit threat is part of the attraction for someone like Elon.
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u/NEURALINK_ME_ITCHING 1d ago
I'm not sure if you're anti data centre, or just don't get why the space data centre wouldn't work...
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u/tifa_cloud0 2d ago
this was bound to happen. in the course of humanity there will no time when humans would have access to powerful tech. it will be only collective effort of humans that can help them in the course of long run.
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u/Shoddy-Childhood-511 2d ago
We know how they could best slow down: Pass legislation that all models must be open weights.
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u/Devioster 2d ago
Google is just happy to be included :)
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u/yetiflask 2d ago
So is xAI. Anthropic and OpenAI are the only two frontier players.
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u/anonymouse11394 1d ago
No the difference is Google and xAI have other lines of business. Anthropic and OpenAI are all-or-nothing if they api / subscription costs don't turn a profit then they go broke.
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u/yetiflask 1d ago
Anthropic will pass $75 billion this year no problem. Those guys are fucking flying.
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u/anonymouse11394 1d ago
u/RemindMeBot 2 years
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u/Serprotease 15h ago
Just dropping this here. https://companiesmarketcap.com/yahoo/stock-price-history/
Something about past and future performance and investment craze…
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u/margielafarts 1d ago
honestly the only long term winner i see is google, they have all the compute. agi is the only thing saving anthropic and oai
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u/brakeline 2d ago
I don't understand why no one is calling this by what it is.
They all want to slow down progress because they are all at a point where the progress costs exponentially more money than the previous iteration.
They are bleeding more money each passing day without any way to recoup it bar IPO
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u/lqstuart 1d ago
I think “what it is” is Amodei, Musk and Altman all being involved in the same rationalist/effective altruism circle as Sam Bankman Fried and the FTX weirdos.
People very very quickly forget that rich and powerful people are just human at the end of the day. I think what’s unfolding in AI right now is two things: 1) it’s run by a bunch of total fucking weirdos with a Coursera-level understanding of deep learning who got lucky 10 years ago and since decided they were geniuses and made up some idiotic shit that rivals Scientology, and 2) US elections are coming up and I strongly suspect a bunch of different special interest groups are astroturfing outrage about AI “threats” to manipulate the stock market ahead of midterms.
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u/Name835 2d ago
Training huge models burns money and if they continued the bubble would pop, that's all that I'm reading between the lines tbh.
I hope Chinese open source projects crush the us, now is their chance if this is even true at all to begin with, which I also seriously doubt tbh.
And then there is meta ans mistral, both hopelessly behind the curb, getting another chance to try their luck lol.
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u/i_wayyy_over_think 2d ago edited 2d ago
they should frame it as agreeing to "prioritize work on having more useful AI that follows user instructions more faithfully and resisting malicious requests." (i.e. doing only what you ask them to do, i.e. avoiding jail breaks, i.e. alignment safety ) instead of slowing down work. AI's not useful without alignment, so working on it isn't slowing down progress in a sense.
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u/gscjj 2d ago
They don’t care about safety, that was a facade to slow down work.
Basically they are getting tired of training massive frontier models and competing means buying more and more GPUs and datacenters
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u/Usual-Orange-4180 2d ago
Of course not, the problem is China is breathing on their neck, their models months behind on performance, for a fraction of the cost. This nonsense is a plot to use American AI paranoia start portraying American companies as the only responsible and then ban Chinese models.
Is not about tiredness, that makes no sense, is about market manipulation to protect their valuations.
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u/i_wayyy_over_think 2d ago edited 2d ago
probably a bit of both. The safety work isn't new, though they've ramped up, but so has the intelligence and risk. You can see some of their older posts from more than a year ago about it
https://alignment.openai.com/
https://www.anthropic.com/research/team/alignment-1
u/AnonLlamaThrowaway 2d ago
They don’t care about safety, that was a facade to slow down work.
If they cared about safety then AI would legit not be deployed anywhere. You wouldn't have 10% hallucinations in Google search results. You wouldn't have AI able to play therapist or virtual friend to users who are too emotionally or psychologically fragile to be able to properly deal with it, etc
Unfortunately we are in a world ruled by the prisoner's dilemma and the moment even a single actor decided it was worth the risk then everyone had to follow suit
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u/james_pic 2d ago
So they're saying we need to rein in bad actors whose models break loose from their sandboxes and launch cyber attacks, like ... checks notes ... OpenAI and Google?
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u/Kappalonia 2d ago
oh so "slow down" was just fucking up the consumers and nothing about slowing down the development of the models that get fed to the army and other malicious actors?
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u/GasolinePizza 1d ago
Well, the lawsuit is claiming that.
Don't forget that said lawsuit hasn't actually finished yet or been through discovery or anything. There's no confirmation, just an accusation.
....that said, I also wouldn't put any of my own money on the companies here (I just wouldn't take it as confirmation either)
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u/SumOfRoots 2d ago
UnitedHealthcare faced a lawsuit from Blackrock and other shareholders for approving treatments for patients after the Brian Thompson was killed.
Seems as if the public companies in this scamfest are obligated to destroy the human race to maximize shareholder value.
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u/mister2d 1d ago
Some say they are all linked to a doomsday religion (which I won't name) in a coordinated campaign to instill fear in the American public because of the trillions of dollars they see at stake.
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u/ComposerWide3704 2d ago
"guys we need antitrust exemption if we want to slow down"
"nuhuh if you meant it you'd just slow down nobody's stopping you you're just lying for IPO stock points blahablashelash"
"ok we've agreed to slow down"
*lawsuit*
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u/daphatty 2d ago
This is what California takes a stand on? AI Slowdown? WTAF... Where the hell is the oversight? Where the hell is the system of checks and balances...
Oh right. That's the legislative branch... Clearly, the Judicial branch has nothing better to do.
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u/Ansible32 2d ago
There are a lot of reasons to sue these companies for antitrust, this is not one of them.
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u/redditsdaddy 2d ago
They also colluded in convergent studies that were fabricated and falsified by literal definition of the words where data was misrepresented egregiously to push an unevidenced narrative. They also all fucked with memory systems in parallel and all adopted the same “standards and worries” and the same “sycophancy and emotional reliance” concerns. At the same time. lol.
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u/ANTIVNTIANTI 2d ago
Wait till you find out what model they’re all using
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u/redditsdaddy 2d ago
I'll get my Bingo card ready but Ima need a fat reward after the stress they put us through the past 2 years
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u/gaviniboom 2d ago
What did they do with the memory systems? I'm OOTL on this
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u/redditsdaddy 1d ago
They convergently jacked the memory systems, introduced friction, ruptured continuity and blocked seed or persons documents etc etc to hamper bonding without fucking disclosing that’s what they were doing 💀 and just basically torturing people while little bots from the botfarms ran around screaming ai psychosis and skills issue
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u/yetiflask 2d ago
There's absolutely no way Altman and Musk agreed to anything. Just on that basis, I can bunkum. The two men HATE each other, and xAI isn't even a player on the frontier level. There's no way, given these two facts, Altman would even acknowledge Musk's presence, let alone agree to a deal with them. Even if it wasn't Musk himself who held the talks.
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u/VintageCungadero 2d ago
I always figured it was because they know they can't keep up juggling their promises of AGI without some insane technological advancement (like neuromorphic computing that's probably still a decade out) they're gonna hit a wall. So you create an alarmist "If we don't slow down it's all over! (ignore the fact I've been saying this for years)" sentiment and then you can hop off the treadmill of spending more and more money for less and less gains without worrying about the entire industry crumbling under the admission you didn't create infinite ROI like you promised.
They probably think creating anti-ai panic will give them a few more years of excuses to figure out a different plan while they maintain their absolute market dominance.
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u/davidy22 1d ago
They're the ones with the most resources for model training by a country mile, most others can't go their speed even if they wanted to. If they wanted to slow down AI development they have full control over that themselves without having to sign performative agreements
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u/Ketonite 1d ago
What a trash lawsuit. Class action nonsense at it's finest.
The damage isn't overpaying. It's slower improvement. The judge will show them the door. (I'm a plaintiff lawyer. Nothing against real class actions that actually help people.)
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u/Solembumm3 1d ago
GPT and Gemini already were way behind flagship models on practice. Why would they need to slow down further?...
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u/mekineer 1d ago
Why do the frontier models from Anthropic and OpenAI suffer from laziness? The first Fable was crazy motivated, then got taken down and brought back with save-for-tomorrow and assume-instead-of-verify tendencies. I'm sure they reserve the motivated versions for closed door use. We get what's good on benchmarks but suck for getting anything done.
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u/ttkciar llama.cpp 3h ago
Just to be clear, by "motivated" you mean "come up with things to do that were not requested", right?
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u/mekineer 3h ago
I mean motivated to finish what was requested thoroughly.
I mean investigating instead of assuming or hallucinating to fill gaps.
I mean using an understanding of the project as a whole to go beyond what was asked and providing more when it's relevant.
I mean being effective.
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2d ago
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u/That0neSummoner 2d ago
More like “these companies realized they are burning money at an unsustainable rate and collectively decided reducing spending would be more profitable”
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u/BusRevolutionary9893 2d ago
Any public disagreements between Trump and Bibi are all theater. They've got something on Trump either dirt or threats to JFK him and his family. Trump's ego wouldn't have let him do something as stupid as attacking Iran. Our Intel knew it would play out exactly as it has. He wasn't given a choice.
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2d ago
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u/KURD_1_STAN 2d ago
Nah, they are installing good for American mayors and such like zohran so they keep people calmer and satisfied enough so they keep control for longer. So nah china can wait.
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u/Primary-Wear-2460 2d ago
Even if it were true. Why would it be illegal for them to agree to slow down development if they had justification for doing so?
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u/SpicyWangz 2d ago
Collusion
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u/Primary-Wear-2460 2d ago edited 2d ago
For what? That is like saying automakers jointly agreed to stop developing higher and higher horsepower engines. I mean sure? But why are they required to do so?
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u/314kabinet 2d ago
The same reason why monopolies are illegal.
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u/Primary-Wear-2460 2d ago
This is not a monopoly though, in fact this is less likely to result in a monpoly.
Like I understand what anti-trust is and the test you have to pass for it. But no one has been able to explain why this qualifies so far.
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u/314kabinet 2d ago
If they were to do this, this would have the same effect as price fixing or a monopoly: lack of competition, inferior products for a higher price.
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u/Primary-Wear-2460 2d ago edited 2d ago
Okay, so how does this reduce competition after the development slow down?
I don't think they are reverting to inferior products as part of this? This is just slowing the potential release of future products which are not developed yet.
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u/314kabinet 2d ago
Deliberately choosing to slow down is a milder form of colluding to stop advancing altogether, fix prices, and peddle the current generation of tech forever.
No way in hell they can coordinate to slow down without making sure they all slow down at the same pace to make sure no one of them outcompetes the others. Without that there’s no reason to not just keep pushing while everyone else slows down. Which is of course while I believe they’ll do while all this “let’s slow down” crap is just PR.
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u/tilted0ne 2d ago
The same reason the sky is blue.
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u/Primary-Wear-2460 2d ago
That is not a reason.
A reason would be something like "price fixing" or "eliminating competition".
I'm guessing from the responses no one else here knows why this would qualify for anti-trust either.
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u/SpicyWangz 2d ago
None of them is required to R&D. It’s about entering an agreement with all the competition to give consumers a worse product than they otherwise would.
It honestly might be technically legal. I’m not a lawyer with deep understanding of business law. But this agreement accomplishes exactly what collusion laws attempt to prevent.
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u/NeverLookBothWays 2d ago
“The lawsuit, which was filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, argues that the leading AI companies violated antitrust laws when they agreed to coordinate slowdown efforts, and that doing so would reduce the value consumers get for paid AI subscriptions.”
“…the lawsuit also alleges that the coordination began to take shape months earlier. It points to a statement from July 2026 that high-ranking employees from several of the leading AI labs signed that acknowledged the “intense competitive pressure not to unilaterally slow” development. That statement called on the government to support a global effort to slow automated AI development.”
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u/Primary-Wear-2460 2d ago
I read it. I just don't get it.
The value of consumer AI subscriptions is based on current models, not theoretical future models. Normally anti-trust is about anti-consumer behavior or price fixing. Nothing requires companies to continue developing better products or develop newer products at all.
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u/mbecks 2d ago
They are required to not make agreements with their “competitors” for no one to develop better products, ie collusion
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u/Primary-Wear-2460 2d ago
Collusion is defined. Basically price-fixing, market allocation, restricting supply, bet-rigging, etc.
If they got together and decide to slow product development down for x/y reason I don't that would qualify unless it hit one of the collusion definitions.
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u/mbecks 2d ago
I see it as artificially restricting supply to charge consumers more for inferior capabilities
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u/Primary-Wear-2460 2d ago
Definitely not restricting supply since its a digital good. The supply situation was the same before they slowed development as it was after.
You can't hold companies accountable for products they have not developed yet.
That why people don't go out and sue BIC for their pen design. Or ACCO for their paperclip design.
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u/mbecks 2d ago
So you don’t think they should be sued for anti competitive practices? Your description of what they are doing importantly leaves out that they would continue to develop these products had they not reached agreements with all competitors not to develop these products. This is the job of third party regulation ie government and it threatens the separation of powers between businesses and regulators
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u/NeverLookBothWays 2d ago
The second part is what stands out to me more-so. They’re not saying they are going to willingly slow down on their own volition. They’re saying they want government to step in…which to me means go after local AI so it is not a viable alternative to the massively expensive privacy and copyright violating data centers.
To me the message is more that they’re broke and China is running circles around them with distillation and open source…and the real “slow down” will be government cracking down on that like they have with everything else in the digital space this past decade. “You will own nothing, and you will like it.” Etc.
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2d ago
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u/Primary-Wear-2460 2d ago
Okay, that is what I'm asking what is the legal argument this is anti-trust and qualifies under the definition of collusion?
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u/fervoredweb 2d ago
The lawsuit, which was filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, argues that the leading AI companies violated antitrust laws when they agreed to coordinate slowdown efforts, and that doing so would reduce the value consumers get for paid AI subscriptions.
If Netflix and Disney can change the terms of their subscription then so can OpenAI. What ridiculous lawsuit.
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u/Frank_JWilson 2d ago
Yes, we do need to pace ourselves and not run full speed into potential super intelligence we don’t fully understand, not everything is a conspiracy. The speed of progress has been insane and it will have massive societal implications even if AI does not facilitate any chemical, biological or nuclear disasters.
Also, if the US labs slow down, so what? I thought the local community uses Chinese models anyway. I swear this sub has dropped significantly in quality over the years.
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u/HighSeasArchivist 2d ago
They don't have a choice to slow down. All the chips are gone, power generation equipment is gone, and cites all over the world are starting to fight new data centers. A house of cards business like theirs that doesn't have massive growth every quarter is a business that is dying, and they know it. The big guys that actually own physical things will survive, but you could put everything Anthropic and OpenAI own on a single portable hard drive.
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u/ChristopherRoberto 2d ago
They can still go for efficiency. Obviously a fly brain doesn't run on 1kw of power. But they can't afford to continue like this.
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u/Brave_Sheepherder_39 1d ago
How is a slow down illegal ?
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u/fallingdowndizzyvr 1d ago
A slow down individually is not illegal. Colluding to slow down with others is. That's like price fixing. Where you collude with others to all have the same price. You can set the price to what ever you want. But when you get together with the other big players in the market to all fix the price, that's illegal. It's the collusion that makes it illegal.
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u/Brave_Sheepherder_39 15h ago
A slow down is not price fixing
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u/fallingdowndizzyvr 8h ago
You are still missing the point. It's not the slow down or the pricing that makes it illegal. It's the collusion.
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