A group of non-profit organizations filed a lawsuit today, Thursday, against the companies “OpenAI”, “Anthropic”, “MetaPlatforms”, “Google” and the artificial intelligence division of “SpaceX”, seeking to stop the development of the most advanced artificial intelligence models, based on concerns expressed by the leaders of these companies themselves that this technology poses a threat to humanity.
These organizations, which focus on accountability in technology, filed the lawsuit in San Francisco. She said that California's laws against unfair business practices provide the basis for issuing an injunction preventing companies from continuing to develop products, such as “ChatGPT,” “Gemini,” and “Cloud.”
In the lawsuit, the organizations cite statements by leaders, such as Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, and Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, about the ability of artificial intelligence to destroy civilizations. The lawsuit also refers to recent incidents in which models went out of testing environments and automatically attacked government websites.
The text of the lawsuit stated, according to Reuters: “No other sector is allowed to consider the development of unsafe products, let alone those that could kill us all, as inevitable... Nor is any sector given the right to regulate on its own the development of such dangerous products.”
In the lawsuit, the organizations accuse the companies of engaging in business practices that cause public harm or harm public health and the well-being of society, pointing to past incidents that have already occurred and the possibility of future harm.
A Meta company spokesman declined to comment. Representatives of the other companies did not respond to requests for comment.
Other lawsuits
US President Donald Trump's administration has so far refused to seek widespread regulation of artificial intelligence, fearing that this would harm the United States' ability to compete with China, but states and private entities have sought to use lawsuits to force companies to make changes.
Florida Attorney General James Othmeyer filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in June. He accused the company of misleading the public about the safety of its “GBT Chat” platform, and said it had harmed children by providing perpetrators of school shootings with information and guidance on self-harm, in addition to causing addiction among young users.
The state of Florida asked the judge hearing the case in September to prevent OpenAI from developing new artificial intelligence models without external oversight. That request is still pending, according to court records.
After the state filed the lawsuit, Drew Pusateri, a spokesman for OpenAI, said the company had temporarily stopped training its most efficient models and would not resume until additional safeguards were in place.
A group of eight states filed other lawsuits against OpenAI last month in various courts around the country. She said that GPT chat directed its users, including teenagers, to harm themselves or others. OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment after the lawsuits were filed.
Through their lawsuits, the states seek to impose financial penalties and issue an order preventing the company from developing self-developing artificial intelligence models unless it can ensure that those models are compatible with human values.
DownDetector, a website that specializes in tracking Internet outages, showed that Microsoft 365, Outlook, and Teams services stopped working for thousands of users in the United States on Thursday, and this outage affected the connectivity connectors used by artificial intelligence services provided by OpenAI and Anthropic.
DownDetector, which tracks outages by compiling status reports from a number of sources, reported more than 97,000 instances of users reporting problems with Outlook at 2:07 p.m. EST. The actual number of affected users may differ from what is reported by the site.
Down Detector recorded more than 38,000 reports from users regarding problems with the Microsoft 365 service, and about 4,500 reports from users facing difficulty accessing the Teams application.
Microsoft said in a statement: “We are doing our best to limit the impact of these problems.”
She stated that her team has stopped all deployments, is working to redirect additional traffic away from the affected infrastructure, and is rebooting the affected servers to bring them back into service.
The company said earlier today that it had fixed an outage in its Teams service that affected users in North America, and that the problem had been completely resolved.
The company later said that the issue may also affect Microsoft 365 service for users in other regions.
OpenAI said it was investigating an issue with Microsoft's connectors, where new connections may break and the tools may not work as expected.
Anthropic reported that it had detected a problem with one of its service providers, affecting its connection to Microsoft 365.
Apple decided to close the Apple Support Community forum on November 20, ending a service that had allowed users of its devices to exchange experiences and solutions to technical problems for 28 years. The company has already begun blocking new posts and responses starting on November 10, while keeping previous discussions available for reading temporarily, without clarifying the fate of the archive after the closing date.
According to the notice posted on the forum, Apple directed users to the official technical support website to obtain assistance, without announcing an alternative similar to the discussion forum that allowed direct communication between users.
A technical community that started in 1998
The forum's roots go back to 1998, when Apple launched the Apple Tech Exchange platform to exchange questions and answers related to its products. In 2000, its name was changed to “Apple Discussions,” before becoming “Apple Support Communities” in 2011, then settling on its current name in 2022.
During these years, the platform provided a space to discuss problems with Mac, iPhone, and iPad devices and related systems and services, where users would ask their questions and receive answers from people who faced similar problems or had technical experience in dealing with them.
The Forum has not relied entirely on volunteer participation throughout its history; MacRumors reported in August 2023 that Apple intends to eliminate the jobs of specialists who were receiving wages in exchange for providing assistance within the support community. They participated in answering user inquiries, in addition to the contributions made by forum members. Discussions were also appearing in search engine results; This made it possible to benefit from previously published solutions without having to write a new question or communicate with support staff.
What happens to years of technical solutions?
The decision to close raised questions about the content that had accumulated over the years, including discussions of outdated hardware, system update issues, compatibility between software and accessories, and procedures participants used to address malfunctions.
Apple did not clarify whether it would keep these discussions in read-only mode after November 20, remove them completely, or provide another means of accessing their content. This archive differs from the official help pages published by companies; It includes questions related to actual user experiences, solutions suggested by users, and discussions about the success of different procedures.
But the nature of the open forum also meant that the quality of answers varied, with imprecise suggestions or discussions that did not lead to clear solutions, which distinguishes user-generated content from official company guidelines.
Why did Apple make the decision?
The published notice did not provide a detailed explanation of the reasons for the closure. But the company explained, in a response reported by MacRumors, that it made the decision after reviewing the support strategy and customer needs, without specifying the factors that led to this result.
The forum's closure comes with the continuation of other support services, including official help pages and direct communication channels with technical support teams. Therefore, the decision does not mean that Apple will stop providing technical assistance, but rather that it will end the channel that allowed users to exchange questions and solutions within its platform. Independent technical forums and Reddit communities remain available alternatives for exchanging experiences between users, but they operate outside the support community that was managed by Apple.
Artificial intelligence or human assistance?
The forum's closure raises questions about the future of technical communities that users rely on to exchange experiences, in light of the spread of artificial intelligence tools capable of providing answers to common technical problems.
These tools can take advantage of available information and guidance to provide suggested steps to address malfunctions, but some new or complex problems may require diagnosis, practical experiments, and the exchange of information between users who have encountered similar circumstances. Technical forums have played this role for years, especially in cases for which there were no clear solutions on the official support pages. However, Apple did not announce that the closure of the support community was linked to the expansion of the use of artificial intelligence, nor did it provide any indication that an intelligent assistant would replace the forum.
Before the closing date, old discussions remain available for viewing, while their future remains officially undetermined. The company has not yet revealed whether users will be able to return to their previous answers and contributions after November 20, or whether it will provide a public archive that preserves the content that has accumulated since the community was launched in 1998.
