They agreed to slow the models. Four subscribers sued the labs.

Four paid subscribers sued Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google on Friday in San Francisco federal court. The complaint is Buist v. Anthropic PBC, No. 3:26-cv-10693. The claim is Sherman Act § 1: the labs agreed, in public, to slow the generative models their customers pay for. The Tech desk files the docket, not the safety sermon.

Charles Buist, Cheyenne Hunt, Christine Bullock and Nick Spetsas say they buy ChatGPT, Claude, Grok or Gemini. They do not object to one lab slowing itself. They object to four labs slowing together. On the morning of Sept. 12, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei published We Must Pace the Frontier: “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models.” Coordinated slowing, he wrote, lets each lab reduce its pace “without sacrificing commercial advantage.” Within about an hour Elon Musk quote-posted: “Dario is right.” Sam Altman: “I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier.” Demis Hassabis called it “the right path forward.” Two days later Altman said progress “should be slower than it otherwise could be,” and that OpenAI would not wait for an antitrust exemption.

We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models.

The plaintiffs want treble damages under the Clayton Act and an injunction against any horizontal agreement to restrain competitive innovation. The class is every U.S. paid subscriber from Sept. 12. The Tech desk files Sunday as it is: an essay, three public yeses, and a complaint that calls the yes an illegal deal.