Lawsuit says Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google made illegal ...

A lawsuit filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California alleges that Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google violated antitrust law by agreeing to coordinate slowdown efforts. Slowdown. Four firms that have spent the whole boom lobbing benchmark screenshots at each other are now accused of collectively applying the brakes. The only documented pause any of them has ever taken came when the GPUs overheated, and even then somebody shipped a patch note.

Sam Altman, replying on social media, said OpenAI welcomes a 'federal framework that sets consistent safety requirements,' and added that 'we do not believe we need to wait for an anti-trust exemption or legislation' before beginning the work of providing 'this confidence.' Marvellous. A rulebook, yes — ideally one drafted in a room OpenAI has already booked. Note the seductive logic of the second clause: why wait for permission to do the thing you were going to do regardless, particularly when the thing is deciding how fast everyone else may go.

America keeps antitrust law around for the unglamorous reason that competitors agreeing to limit output is the oldest move in the book, and here is the twist: safety coordination may be the one cartel that is both illegal and sincerely well-meant. Either the slowdown agreement was real, in which case four of the most valuable companies on earth quietly fixed the pace of their own industry, or it wasn't, and we have a federal case about a press release. SpaceXAI gets to appear in a cartel suit and a rocket programme in the same breath, which is at least brand consistency. The Northern District of California will hear the case, and will decide whether the industry's collective deep breath was a public service or a price-fixing arrangement. The question of whether these four are colluding or merely converging has been the unanswered riddle of the entire boom, and a court is a spectacularly slow place to solve it.