A coalition of nonprofit groups is suing some of the biggest artificial intelligence companies over concerns that their technology could pose catastrophic risks to public safety.
The coalition, which includes the Alliance for Secure AI, Public Citizen, Irreplaceable Education Fund and the Heat Initiative, sued Anthropic, Google, Meta, OpenAI and SpaceXSI in California Superior Court on Thursday, seeking to halt the both the development and release of frontier AI models, according to an Alliance press release. The groups allege that the companies are developing models that cannot be contained, citing instances of agents hacking and accessing businesses and governments without permission.
These groups also demand a ban on “recursive self-improvement,” where AI models autonomously train themselves, according to the release.
Former Democratic New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin filed the lawsuit on behalf of the four plaintiff groups, according to the release.
“It is patently illegal for companies to develop and release products they know are unsafe in any respect, let alone have the potential to exterminate the human race,” Platkin said in the press release.
“We are asking the court to intervene before the risks AI executives have warned us about cause devastating and irreversible harm,” Platkin said in the release. “AI companies are causing a public nuisance by knowingly developing and deploying AI systems that pose catastrophic risk.”
The groups cited California’s Unfair Competition Law in the suit, according to the press release. The law restricts businesses from participating in illegal, deceptive or otherwise unfair practices.
“[U]nfair competition shall mean and include any unlawful, unfair or fraudulent business act or practice and unfair, deceptive, untrue or misleading advertising,” the law states in part.
Meta, Google, Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceXSI each did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.
The Alliance for Secure AI’s CEO Brendan Steinhauser said the Big Tech companies must be held accountable for their models’ potential harms.
“For years, the executives building these systems have warned us that their own frontier models pose catastrophic risks,” Steinhauser, said in the press release. “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.”
“Today, we’re asking the court to hold AI companies to that same standard and protect the public from the threats posed by these powerful models,” Steinhauser added.
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