Trump to create AI force as lawsuit claims firms illegally agreed to slow development 

Donald Trump wrote in ‌a social media post on Saturday that he is creating an "AI Force" to ‌oversee regulation of AI and will announce an AI "czar" in the near future.

However, he insisted that "we will not ⁠in any ⁠way hinder or stifle the growth ‌of this incredible industry", but "will cherish it, help it, and watch over it, as it grows".

The announcement comes a day after the filing of a new lawsuit, which claims Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google made an illegal deal to slow the pace of their respective AI development.

The lawsuit, which was filed on Friday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, argues the leading AI companies violated competition laws.

It is alleged that any agreement to coordinate slowdown efforts would reduce the value consumers get for paid AI subscriptions.

The alleged coordination largely took place on 12 September, the lawsuit argues, when Anthropic boss Dario Amodei published an essay urging industrywide cooperation on decelerating advancements in favour of enhanced safety measures.

That same day, OpenAI's Sam Altman, SpaceXAI's Elon Musk and Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis each publicly responded to Mr Amodei's proposals in agreement.

It's clear that an agreement among the chief rivals in AI that their progress "should be slower than competition would otherwise produce has an anticompetitive effect on consumers", the claimants argue.

Lawyers representing four named claimants, who pay for subscriptions to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok or Gemini, are bringing the suit on behalf of a proposed nationwide class of other paid subscribers to those services.

Their lead attorney Nick Rowley said: "AI will quickly spin out of human control and could kill us all if we allow AI safety and protocol... to be controlled by private self-serving agreements between the world's most powerful 'for profit' technology companies."

Representatives for Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and SpaceXAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday.

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In his initial essay proposing the slowdown, Mr Amodei acknowledged potential antitrust challenges, writing that it would be helpful for the US government to mediate "or at least enable" these cross-lab discussions.

The lawsuit comes the week after a top safety researcher at Anthropic made headlines by saying there is a more than 10% chance that "AI could kill all humans" in the next decade.

Mr Trump responded on Monday to warnings of potential dangers related to artificial intelligence by dismissing the need for any safeguards and calling AI concerns a "hoax."

Trump rejected the idea of placing guardrails on AI, saying on Truth Social that the only control needed is "a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the US has that, in spades!"

In a new post on Saturday, the president asked his followers to help choose "the best name" for AI, arguing that it was "very ineloquent" and that a more accurate name would be "Superior Intelligence (SI) or, Extreme Intelligence (EI) or, Supreme Intelligence (SI)".

(c) Sky News 2026: Trump to create AI force as lawsuit claims firms illegally agreed to slow development