The Associated Press reports:

A coalition of online safety and consumer advocacy groups on Thursday sued five of the world’s leading artificial intelligence companies to halt further development, alleging the tech giants can’t prevent their own creations from causing “catastrophic” harm.

The lawsuit in San Francisco Superior Court follows a midterm election that could bring a moment of reckoning for the fast-moving AI industry, as Democrats who won back control of Congress stress the need to regulate the technology.

The filing, first reported on by The Associated Press, asks a judge to stop Anthropic, Google, Meta, OpenAI and SpaceXSI from developing or deploying new AI models, pointing to documented examples of cyberattacks and other harmful actions by AI systems and the companies’ own alarming acknowledgments that their technology has the potential to someday destroy humanity.

“No other industry is allowed to treat its own development of unsafe products — much less ones that could kill us all — as inevitable,” reads the complaint from the Irreplaceable Education Fund, Public Citizen, Heat Initiative and the Alliance for Secure AI. “Plaintiffs bring this suit to stop Defendants from continuing their unlawful path to disaster.”

The AI industry has generated excitement and stock market gains, but also deep fears that the technology could go rogue and escape human control. Recent incidents of AI agents hacking government websites and companies — including when OpenAI’s ChatGPT hacked into another AI company on its own in July — have accelerated those concerns. [Continue reading…]