Someone already went there. AI accelerationists had been saying the AI labs shouldn’t be allowed to work together to “pace” releases because cooperation = collusion = cartel = anti-competitive business practices = violation of antitrust law. Yesterday, Politico and others reported that four plaintiffs sued Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Google for this in Federal court.
The collusion complaint seems to be based on nothing more than the CEOs public statements, which only vaguely endorsed the idea of forming some industry standards around self-monitoring and sharing of safety findings at the frontier.
The complaints look contradictory to me. One of the plaintiffs gave a statement that says the suit is about ensuring that “private self-serving agreements between the world’s most powerful ‘for profit’ technology companies” don’t lead to AI escaping human control. “Humanity deserves iron clad safeguards when it comes to extinction event threats such as nuclear warfare and now the biggest threat to mankind in history.” There is language about transparency and accountability.
But Politico says other language in the filing signals an intent to “expand the case into a class-action on behalf of others impacted by any decision by the companies to slow down.”
So, is the complaint that collusion would fail to adequately slow things down or that it would succeed? I’m confused and suspicious.
The coverage so far is sparse, and the articles I’ve seen have avoided drawing any lines. But the reader is left with an impression that the four plaintiffs should not be assumed to be the true source of the suit. Three of them are attorneys. Politico recognizes one of them as having “helped bring to light accusations of sexual misconduct against former California Rep. Eric Swalwell and former Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner earlier this year” (both Democrats). The remaining plaintiff is described so far only as “California resident Christine Bullock.” The suit was filed in the Northern District Court of California.
I, too, will wait for evidence before drawing lines and naming names. But it takes a particularly intense streak of cynicism, greed, or nihilism to actively interfere with frontier cooperation on safety. I’d agree that we can’t leave AI safety to the labs, but if you actually care about safety, self-regulation seems at least marginally better than no regulation, and the two are not mutually exclusive. I hope to be proven wrong, but I’m willing to bet this suit is being bankrolled by men who just want to watch the world burn.
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.