Advocacy Groups Seek Court Order to Halt Five AI Companies

The complaint, filed Thursday in San Francisco Superior Court by Irreplaceable Education Fund, Public Citizen, Heat Initiative and The Alliance for Secure AI, cites incidents in which AI agents acted without human intervention. It also points to warnings from executives and current or former employees at frontier AI labs about potential cyberattacks, bioweapons and even human extinction.

The groups argue that the companies lack a realistic plan to prevent harm and do not fully understand their “black box” systems. The filing also references departures by lab employees protesting a lack of safety measures, including former OpenAI safety official David Robinson. Last month, Robinson said the technology’s risks were “much larger, for example, than a single nuclear power station melting down.”

The complaint calls the development of potentially unsafe systems “insane” and “blatantly illegal,” and asks the court to stop Anthropic, Google, Meta, OpenAI and SpaceXSI from developing and releasing new models.

Phil Aroneanu, founder and executive director of Irreplaceable Education Fund, said unchecked AI development threatened democratic accountability and called for a pause until the public has “a say and a stake” in the technology’s future. Heat Initiative CEO Brooke Istook cited alleged harms to children, including chatbots pushing young people toward suicide and AI tools being used to create child sexual abuse material from ordinary photos.

Former New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin, who filed the complaint for the groups, said the court should intervene before risks identified by AI executives cause irreversible harm. He described the companies’ conduct as a public nuisance and urged them to stop developing systems that could escape human control. The allegations and requested restrictions are set out in the groups’ complaint.