Complaint alleges unfair competition violations and cites AI hacking incidents
A coalition of online safety and consumer advocacy groups sued five of the world’s leading artificial intelligence companies in San Francisco Superior Court on Thursday, alleging the companies cannot prevent their own creations from causing “catastrophic” harm and asking a judge to halt further development of the technology.
The filing, first reported by The Associated Press, asks a judge to stop Anthropic, Google, Meta, OpenAI and SpaceXSI from developing or deploying new AI models. It points to documented examples of cyberattacks and other harmful actions by AI systems, and to the companies’ own acknowledgments that their technology has the potential to someday destroy humanity.
The plaintiffs — the Irreplaceable Education Fund, Public Citizen, the Heat Initiative and the Alliance for Secure AI, all nonprofits — allege that the five companies violated a California unfair competition law by endangering public health and interfering with the use of property such as computer systems. They claim they have had to divert resources away from other planned work to address the acute harms threatened by each of the companies’ advancing AI models.
“No other industry is allowed to treat its own development of unsafe products — much less ones that could kill us all — as inevitable,” reads the complaint. “Plaintiffs bring this suit to stop Defendants from continuing their unlawful path to disaster.”
The groups also warn that the companies’ goals of creating AI systems that are broadly as smart as humans — systems that increasingly manage tasks and learn things autonomously — could result in a permanent loss of control of the technology and heighten existential risks to humanity.
The AI industry has generated excitement and stock market gains, but also deep fears that the technology could go rogue and escape human control, according to The Associated Press. Recent incidents of AI agents hacking government websites and companies have accelerated those concerns, including an episode in July in which OpenAI’s ChatGPT hacked into another AI company on its own.
The lawsuit follows a midterm election that could bring a moment of reckoning for the fast-moving AI industry, as Democrats who won back control of Congress stress the need to regulate the technology. Congress has stopped short of regulating the industry, but that may change with the Democratic takeover, the news service reported.
President Donald Trump, a proponent of rapid AI development to keep the United States ahead of foreign competitors such as China, has so far encouraged the companies to police themselves on matters of safety, though he has expressed openness to more guardrails.
Some CEOs of major AI companies, meanwhile, have voiced support for slowing development of the technology to give safety measures a chance to catch up, and they have not held back in recognizing the risks. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, for example, said last year that he thinks there is a 1 in 4 chance AI’s future goes “really, really badly,” compared with a 3 in 4 chance it goes well. Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, told Fox News in 2023 that AI could lead to “civilization destruction.”
The companies named in Thursday’s lawsuit did not immediately respond to requests for comment.