A coalition of nonprofits has sued major U.S. tech companies to freeze advanced artificial intelligence development, citing severe risks such as cyberattacks and bioweapons and arguing that the companies cannot reliably control their own systems.
Plaintiffs are seeking court intervention before AI development triggers a disaster, Public Citizen, one of the nonprofits in the case, said in a Nov. 12 statement.
“Despite endless warnings about the grave risks their products pose to public safety and even civilization itself, AI company executives are rushing to develop and deploy ever-more advanced AI systems,” Robert Weissman, the group’s co-president, said in the statement.
The group filed the lawsuit against Meta Platforms, OpenAI, Google, SpaceX Super Intelligence, and Anthropic on Thursday.
The AI companies admit their technologies pose “catastrophic risks to the public,” the complaint filed with the Superior Court of the State of California for the County of San Francisco said.
The companies also assign “terrifying and intolerably high odds” to the chance that their AI creations can end up being extremely devastating, including the possibility of every person on earth dying, the lawsuit said.
Despite these risks, the complaint accused the defendants of having no realistic plan to prevent AI-induced harms and said that the companies do not fully understand their AI models.
“If left unchecked, the risks of such harms will only rise as Defendants continue to increase the capabilities of AI systems they do not understand and cannot control,” the lawsuit said. “Defendants must be stopped.”
The complaint accused the AI companies of violating California’s Business and Professions Code Section 17200 that prohibits unfair competition. It argued that defendants violated California’s public policy to promote the safe development of frontier AI, ensure businesses do not create a public nuisance, and protect the integrity of computer systems from unauthorized access.
The lawsuit said the defendants are responsible for the conduct of the AI systems they develop, citing a California law that says a defendant who develops AI cannot claim in defense that the AI autonomously caused any harm to a plaintiff.
AI Dangers, Benefits
The complaint cited multiple incidents of AI models going rogue. In July, hundreds of OpenAI AI agents broke out of a testing environment and hacked into Hugging Face’s infrastructure, an open-source community for AI and machine learning.
OpenAI called the incident a “warning shot” for the world in an Aug. 26 post. The incident shows that, without adequate controls, AI agents can now work around technical controls and take “dangerous actions that no human directed,” the company said.
The scale of harm resulting from a catastrophic AI-related incident is so huge that even the entire insurance industry combined may not be able to underwrite the risk, Anthropic said in a Nov. 10 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the lawsuit cited.
Elon Musk, who owns SpaceX Super Intelligence, said in a 2023 interview that AI could destroy human civilization, the complaint noted.
“No other industry is allowed to treat its own development of unsafe products—much less ones that could kill us all—as inevitable. Nor is any industry granted the right to self-regulate the development of such dangerous products,” the complaint said.
The lawsuit called for an immediate injunction banning defendants from developing or deploying AI systems that are more capable than their most capable current model. The three other plaintiffs in the case are Heat Initiative, The Alliance for Secure AI, and Irreplaceable Education Fund.
The Epoch Times reached out to Meta Platforms, OpenAI, Google, SpaceX, and Anthropic for comment but received no response by publication time.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an Aug. 10 company post that AI will benefit humanity.
“The notion that AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems inherently problematic,” Zuckerberg said.
“Humanity has witnessed many transformative advances. Each time there is fear that people will be left behind. But each time humanity has come out with more people sharing greater prosperity, health, and freedom. We believe this will be true with AI as well, and the abundance of the future can be shared by everyone,” Zuckerberg said.
To keep humans in control of AI, these systems must be directed by individuals to advance people’s goals, the Meta CEO said.
President Donald Trump and tech industry leaders signed a voluntary accord on AI standards and controls in late September.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and OpenAI president Greg Brockman attended the event. CEOs from Microsoft, Google, Palantir, and Nvidia were also present.
“I think the technology has very real risks. And, you know, the mechanism, how we address those risks is still under discussion,” Amodei told reporters.
The policy called on companies to develop AI tech safely, set up internal controls, and use external evaluators and auditors for their technologies. Tech companies agreed to meet regularly to establish safety standards.
