Four nonprofits asked a San Francisco court Thursday to stop several major AI developers from building or releasing systems more capable than the ones they already have. The lawsuit announced by Public Citizen names Anthropic, Google, Meta, OpenAI and SpaceX Super Intelligence entities.
The complaint asks for an immediate injunction, a court order that would restrict what the companies can do. The filing itself does not impose that restriction. Edit USA could not verify that the court had issued an order on Thursday.
Where the plaintiffs would draw the line
The complaint sets the proposed cutoff at the most capable system each defendant had when the complaint was filed. It asks the court to bar both the development and the deployment of systems that exceed that level. The first request does not expressly call for taking existing chatbots offline. It could still affect future versions of services such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini if a judge granted it as written.
A second request would prevent the defendants from letting AI systems independently conduct or direct research and development of more capable AI. That request would reach some work inside the companies even if the public never saw the resulting model. The complaint names OpenAI Group and the OpenAI Foundation separately. It also lists two SpaceX Super Intelligence entities. The proposed order is directed at the defendants in this case.
Irreplaceable Education Fund, Public Citizen, Heat Initiative and Future Tech Insights, which does business as the Alliance for Secure AI, brought the case in the Superior Court of California in San Francisco. Their complaint invokes California’s Unfair Competition Law and argues that the court should intervene on public safety grounds. The judge would decide whether to grant relief and what it would cover.
How this differs from California’s AI reporting law
California already requires covered AI developers to publish safety frameworks and report certain critical incidents under Senate Bill 53, which Gov. Gavin Newsom signed in 2025. That law sets transparency and reporting requirements. This lawsuit uses a different statute to seek limits on what the named companies can build or deploy.
The copy of the complaint made public by the plaintiffs’ attorneys leaves the case number blank. It supplies the terms the plaintiffs want, but gives no date for a hearing. A court order would establish whether any limits take effect and which companies, systems and activities they cover.
