Anthropic founder backs slowing AI as lawsuit alleges anticompetitive pact
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Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old researcher, announced that he was leaving Anthropic because he considered the AI companies’ race toward more capable systems irresponsible. Four days later, Anthropic founder Dario Amodei called for the industry to deliberately slow model development, accept external evaluators with broad access to internal safety procedures and seek coordination among democratic governments; Sam Altman and Elon Musk publicly agreed.
According to MIT Technology Review Brasil, four paying subscribers sued Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google in a federal court in California, alleging that the ethical convergence was in practice an agreement among competitors to slow product development. The article also discusses the Collingridge dilemma and questions regulatory thresholds based only on computing power, such as 10²⁵ FLOPs in the European Union and 10²⁶ in California, because they measure training inputs rather than the capabilities of the resulting models.
Why it matters · editorial interpretation
The case puts two responses to AI’s progress in tension: coordination to reduce risks and competition among companies. The report also suggests that rules based only on FLOPs may struggle to keep pace with capability assessments more directly tied to the models.
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