A group of non-profit organizations filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, Google, Meta on Thursday in California Superior Court (San Francisco County).✴ Platforms, OpenAI and SpaceXSI demanding that they be banned from developing advanced AI models due to concerns that this technology could pose a threat to humanity.
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Nonprofits focused on technology accountability, including the Irreplaceable Education Fund, Public Citizen, Heat Initiative, and The Alliance for Secure AI, noted that even their CEOs have warned that advanced AI systems pose an imminent and catastrophic threat to humanity. According to the plaintiffs, California’s laws against unfair business practices give the court grounds to issue an order that would prohibit the companies from continuing to develop products such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude.
Specifically, the plaintiffs rely on California’s Unfair Competition Law to challenge the companies’ actions that they claim pose a threat to the health, safety and property of citizens.
The lawsuit describes cases in which pre-existing, less powerful AI systems bypassed built-in security mechanisms, unauthorizedly penetrated external computer networks and performed malicious actions not intended by their developers.
“No other industry is allowed to assume that the development of unsafe products, much less ones that could kill us all, is inevitable,” the lawsuit says. “And no industry is given the right to independently regulate the creation of such dangerous products.”
“We must pause the development of advanced AI systems until the technology is under control and the American people have a voice and real participation in determining its future—instead of leaving everything to the discretion of a handful of billionaires who head the largest technology corporations,” said Phil Aroneanu, founder and executive director of the Irreplaceable Education Fund.
As the Donald Trump administration has shied away from broadly regulating AI, believing it would hinder the U.S.’s competition with China, state and private governments are trying to use lawsuits to force companies to make AI changes.
For example, in June, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier filed a lawsuit against OpenAI alleging that the company misled the public about the security of its ChatGPT platform. According to his statement, the service harmed children by providing information to potential school shooters, giving advice on self-harm and causing addiction among young users. And in September, representatives of the state of Florida asked a judge to prohibit OpenAI from developing new AI models without external control. A decision on this case has not yet been made.
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