A coalition of nonprofit groups sued five major artificial intelligence developers on Thursday in a bid to block their development of AI models, alleging the companies knowingly created technology that poses catastrophic risks to humanity.
The lawsuit — filed in San Francisco Superior Court by the Alliance for Secure AI, alongside advocacy groups Irreplaceable Education Fund, Public Citizen and the Heat Initiative — named Anthropic, Google, Meta, OpenAI and SpaceXSI (SpaceX Super Intelligence).
“For years, the executives building these systems have warned us that their own frontier models pose catastrophic risks,” Brendan Steinhauser, CEO of The Alliance for Secure AI, said in a statement.
“Yet they keep racing to develop and market increasingly powerful AI that they admit they cannot reliably control, and are now handing over AI research and development to AI itself,” he added.
A Meta spokesperson for Meta declined to comment. The other tech companies targeted in the suit did not respond to a request for comment.
The litigation comes amid broader concerns about AI safety, sparked by several publicly reported incidents in which AI agents went rogue and carried out unauthorized actions.
The nonprofit groups contend that AI companies are developing technology they have admitted they can’t control. The risk could grow as the companies rely more on their own AI models to develop future platforms without human intervention, a concept known as “recursive self-improvement,” according to the suit.
“Defendants know these systems do not consistently act in accordance with their intentions,” the lawsuit states. “And Defendants know there is no reliable method to control their AI systems and prevent them from causing harm.”
The nonprofits also point to past comments by AI company executives acknowledging the potential harm from their technology. In 2015, for example, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said AI will “probably most likely lead to the end of the world.” In 2025, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei suggested there was a 25% chance that the development of AI could lead to disastrous outcomes.
As scrutiny of their tech’s safety grows, tech leaders have underlined their safety commitments. AI company leaders, including Altman, Amodei and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, in October voiced support for an industrywide slowdown in AI development after an Anthropic employee said there’s a 10% chance AI “could kill all humans.”
