Last Week in Antitrust Litigation (#031)
- Kressin Powers
- Oct 19, 2025
- 4 min read
Week of October 13, 2025
Top Takeaways
AI Competition in the Crosshairs: Microsoft and OpenAI’s relationship is under fire, with plaintiffs claiming their exclusive compute deal kept ChatGPT prices high—part of a broader trend of antitrust focus on AI platforms.
Financial Institutions Under Pressure: A new class action accuses leading banks of coordinating prime lending rates for decades, a reminder that even long-standing industry benchmarks can invite antitrust risk.
Mixed Messages from the Courts: Judges dismissed some overbroad market definitions but allowed detailed price-fixing claims to proceed, reinforcing the importance of precision and documentation in competitive strategy.
New Cases Filed
Changsha Sud Elec. Com. LLC v. Guangzhou Yimei Cosm. Co. (W.D. Wash. Oct. 13, 2025): Changsha filed suit against Guangzhou alleging, among other things, fraudulent procurement and sham enforcement of a design patent in violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act. The complaint asserts that Guangzhou knowingly failed to disclose prior sales of identical hair wax stick designs when obtaining the patent and then filed baseless infringement complaints with Amazon and TEMU to delist Changsha’s products and. Changsha alleges this conduct harmed competition by eliminating lawful rivals.
Bryant v. Microsoft Corp. (N.D. Cal. Oct. 13, 2025): A group of ChatGPT subscribers filed a putative class action against Microsoft alleging that Microsoft entered an anticompetitive agreement with OpenAI to restrain trade in the consumer generative AI market violation of, among others, Section 1 of the Sherman Act and the Cartwright Act. The complaint claims Microsoft leveraged its investment and exclusive cloud-compute agreement to control OpenAI’s access to GPU resources, artificially restricting output and maintaining inflated ChatGPT prices 100–200 times higher than competitors until OpenAI obtained alternative compute from Google in June 2025. Plaintiffs allege the “compute restraint” allowed Microsoft—a horizontal competitor through its Copilot products—to fix prices, suppress innovation, and degrade product quality across the consumer generative AI market.
Normandin v. JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. (D. Conn. Oct. 16, 2025): Plaintiffs filed a putative class action complaint against seven major banks and unnamed co-conspirators alleging a decades-long conspiracy to fix, raise, and stabilize U.S. “prime rates” in violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act. The complaint contends that defendants collectively pegged their prime lending rates at exactly 3.00 percentage points above the Federal Reserve’s target federal funds rate and coordinated through the Wall Street Journal’s publication of the “WSJ Prime Rate,” eliminating all competitive variation since 1994. Plaintiffs allege this uniform rate-fixing inflated interest costs on trillions of dollars in consumer and small-business variable-rate loans, including home-equity lines of credit and credit-card balances, depriving borrowers of competitive pricing.
Cumulus Media New Holdings v. Nielsen Co. (US) LLC (S.D.N.Y. Oct. 16, 2025): Cumulus filed suit against Nielsen alleging monopolization of the national radio ratings data and local radio ratings data markets and illegal tying in violation of, among others, Section 2 of the Sherman Act. The complaint asserts that Nielsen, the sole provider of national radio ratings data and dominant supplier of local radio ratings data, abused its market power by conditioning access to its indispensable “Nationwide” product on the purchase of separate, high-priced local ratings data—thereby coercing broadcasters like Cumulus to buy unwanted services and foreclosing lower-cost rival Eastlan from competing. Cumulus alleges that Nielsen’s 2024 “Tying Policy” and earlier “Subscriber First Policy” together entrenched its monopolies by excluding non-subscribing stations from published audience rankings, forcing stations to buy Nielsen data to remain visible to advertisers.
The follow-on case that was filed is:
Equativ SAS v. Google LLC (E.D. Va. Oct. 13, 2025) (alleging Google monopolized the ad server and ad exchange markets like in United States v. Google LLC (E.D. Va. Jan. 24, 2023))
Dispositive Orders and Verdicts
Cognizant Trizetto Software Grp. v. Infosys Ltd. (N.D. Tex. Oct. 9, 2025): In this case asserting counterclaims alleging Cognizant engaged in anticompetitive conduct in the healthcare payor software and IT services markets in violation of the Sherman Act and the Texas Free Enterprise and Antitrust Act, the court granted Cognizant’s motion to dismiss Infosys’s antitrust counterclaims without prejudice. The court held that (a) Infosys failed to plead a legally sufficient relevant market because it excluded in-house and other substitute products that consumers use for claims processing, and (b) its proposed “IT services for healthcare payor software” market was likewise infirm for omitting interchangeable service providers.
In re Granulated Sugar Antitrust Litig. (D. Minn. Oct. 15, 2025): In this MDL alleging price fixing and unlawful information exchange in the U.S. granulated sugar market in violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act and parallel state laws, the court granted in part and denied in part the defendants’ motions to dismiss. The court held that (a) the allegations plausibly state § 1 claims for price fixing and information exchange against ASR/Domino and United based on circumstantial evidence of communications through an intermediary, (b) the claims against Michigan Sugar, Louis Dreyfus, Imperial, and U.S. Sugar Savannah were dismissed without prejudice for failure to plead parallel conduct or concerted action, and (c) the indirect-purchaser antitrust state-law claims survive except for Alabama, which was withdrawn.
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