Washington, 13 November (H.S.): A coalition of nonprofit organisations filed a lawsuit on Thursday against five leading artificial intelligence (AI) developers in the San Francisco Superior Court in California, seeking to prevent them from further developing advanced AI models. The organisations allege that the companies have knowingly created technologies that pose potentially catastrophic risks to humanity.

According to a report by CBS News, the lawsuit was filed by the Alliance for Secure AI, along with advocacy organisations including the Irreplaceable Education Fund, Public Citizen and the Heat Initiative. The five companies named as defendants are Anthropic, Google, Meta, OpenAI and SpaceX Super Intelligence (SpaceXSI).

In a statement, Brendan Steinhauser, CEO of the Alliance for Secure AI, said executives at these companies had been warning for years that their own advanced AI models could pose catastrophic risks.

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 said.

The technology companies named in the lawsuit did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The legal action comes amid growing concerns over AI safety, following several publicly reported incidents in which AI agents allegedly went out of control and carried out actions without authorisation.

The nonprofit organisations contend that AI developers are advancing technologies that they themselves have acknowledged may be difficult to control. According to the lawsuit, the risks could intensify as companies increasingly rely on their own AI models to develop more advanced systems with little or no human intervention. This process is known as recursive self-improvement.

The complaint states that the defendants are aware that their systems do not always operate in accordance with their intentions. It further alleges that the companies have no reliable means of controlling their AI systems or preventing them from causing harm.

The organisations have also cited previous public remarks by senior executives of AI companies in which they acknowledged the potential dangers associated with the technology. In 2015, for instance, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly said that artificial intelligence could probably most likely lead to the end of the world.

Similarly, in 2025, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei suggested that there was a 25 per cent probability that advances in AI could lead to disastrous consequences.

Meanwhile, as scrutiny of AI safety continues to intensify, technology industry leaders have reiterated their commitment to developing the technology responsibly. In October, prominent AI executives, including Altman, Amodei and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, expressed support for slowing the pace of AI development across the industry.

Their remarks followed a warning by an Anthropic employee, who reportedly estimated a 10 per cent possibility that AI could kill all humans. The latest lawsuit adds to the growing debate over the potential risks of increasingly powerful AI systems and the need for stronger safeguards to ensure their safe development and deployment.

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Hindusthan Samachar / Jun Sarkar