AI Briefing

The slowdown consensus just met its first lawyer. Four paying subscribers are suing Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and SpaceXAI for allegedly agreeing to go slower, and three days after the filing SpaceXAI shipped a 2.1-trillion-parameter model. Meanwhile SoftBank is borrowing $11 billion to write one cheque to OpenAI, AMD quietly joined the trillion-dollar club, and Alibaba released the best open image model in the world under a licence that forbids you from making money with it.

01PolicyCBS News ↗

Four Chatbot Subscribers Are Suing the AI Labs for Agreeing to Slow Down

A class action filed Friday in the Northern District of California accuses Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and SpaceXAI of violating antitrust law by coordinating a slowdown in frontier AI development. The plaintiffs are careful: they say each company is free to go slower on its own, but that agreeing to do it together is the illegal 'shortcut' of substituting collective restraint for individual accountability. It is the first real legal test of Dario Amodei's pacing essay, and it turns a safety argument into a price-fixing question about what a $20 subscription is supposed to buy.

02ProductOfficeChai ↗

Three Days After Being Sued for Slowing Down, SpaceXAI Shipped a 2.1 Trillion Parameter Model

Grok 4.7 landed Monday on a new base model roughly 40% larger than its predecessor, trained with a longer reinforcement learning run weighted toward tasks that take hours to finish. Pricing did not move: $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output, identical to Grok 4.6 from a month ago. It edges past GPT-5.6 Sol and Claude Fable 5.1 on a handful of coding and agentic benchmarks while costing a fraction of either, which makes the timing awkward for a company currently accused of conspiring to decelerate.

03Open SourceThe Decoder ↗

Alibaba Released the Best Open Image Model It Has Ever Made and Banned You From Selling With It

Qwen-Image-2.1 packs its visual generation into just 7 billion parameters, runs on a consumer 3090, natively produces and edits transparent RGBA images, and accepts up to ten reference images at once. Qwen claims it beats most closed models on its own benchmark. The catch is the licence: earlier Qwen-Image releases were Apache 2.0, and this one is research-only, with commercial users required to email Alibaba for a separate agreement. The Hugging Face discussion pages filled up within days, which is the real story here about how long 'open weights' stays open.

04FundingTech Startups ↗

SoftBank Is Borrowing $11 Billion in Junk Bonds to Make One Payment to OpenAI

SoftBank launched $10 billion of dollar notes plus €1 billion of euro notes on Monday, with proceeds earmarked for the $10 billion third tranche of its OpenAI follow-on investment, closing October 1. Fitch rated the paper BB+, the top rung of speculative grade. If it prices as planned it becomes the largest non-financial corporate bond deal ever out of Asia-Pacific, beating 7-Eleven's $10.93 billion from 2021. SoftBank's total exposure to OpenAI reaches roughly $64.6 billion for about 13% of the company, funded increasingly by debt rather than cash.

05IndustrySemafor ↗

AMD Joined the Trillion-Dollar Club and Nvidia Is Still Five Times Bigger

AMD shares jumped about 10% Monday to an intraday record of $613.92, pushing it past a $1 trillion market cap for the first time and making it the fourth US chipmaker to get there after Nvidia, Broadcom and Micron. The stock is up more than 180% this year on a five-day run of roughly 25%. The number that matters is the gap: Nvidia sits near $5.4 trillion and still holds most of the AI data centre market, so AMD's milestone measures how much money is chasing a credible second supplier rather than how much share it has actually taken.