McIlroy produces big finish with eagle at No. 18 to move into contention at BMW PGA Championship

VIRGINIA WATER, England (AP) — Rory McIlroy hit a 4-iron from 230 yards to inside 2 feet and holed the eagle putt to finish off a 3-under 69 on Saturday and move into contention to win the BMW PGA Championship for the second time.

The No. 2-ranked McIlroy's birdie-eagle finish on the back-to-back closing par 5s at Wentworth left him on 11-under 205 after the third round, just two strokes off the lead held by Manuel Elvira and Filippo Cello on a crowded leaderboard.

There are 15 players within three shots of the lead — but one name stands out.

“I feel like I’ve given myself a real opportunity tomorrow,” said McIlroy, who won the European tour's flagship event in 2014 — in the same summer he captured two major titles, the British Open and the PGA Championship.

On a day when second-round leader Ryan Gerard went backward with a 75, many others took a big step forward — even if the top of the leaderboard doesn't contain too many household names.

Neither Celli (69) nor Elvira (68) have won a title on the European tour, while two of the three players tied for third place a shot back — Johannes Veerman (64) and Alejandro Del Rey (64) — are ranked No. 357 and No. 236, respectively. The other player on 12 under is J.J. Spaun, the former U.S. Open winner who shot 68.

McIlroy is in a five-man group in a tie for sixth place that also includes Adam Scott (71) and LIV Golf star Joaquin Niemann (67).

“It’s going to be an interesting day,” McIlroy said, looking ahead to the final round. “There’s a lot of people around the lead. I think the conditions the last couple of days, that’s the reason it hasn’t let anyone get away from the pack just because it has played so tricky and difficult.”

See AP’s full golf coverage here

USA's Ryan Gerard plays from the 4th fairway on day three of the PGA Championship at Wentworth Golf Club in Virginia Water, England, Saturday Sept. 19, 2026. (Adam Davy/PA via AP)

Rory McIlroy of Northern Ireland plays from the 1st fairway on day three of the PGA Championship at Wentworth Golf Club in Virginia Water, England, Saturday Sept. 19, 2026. (Adam Davy/PA via AP)

Rory McIlroy of Northern Ireland plays from the 4th fairway on day three of the PGA Championship at Wentworth Golf Club in Virginia Water, England, Saturday Sept. 19, 2026. (Adam Davy/PA via AP)

Rory McIlroy of Northern Ireland on the 16th green on day three of the PGA Championship at Wentworth Golf Club in Virginia Water, England, Saturday Sept. 19, 2026. (Adam Davy/PA via AP)

A new lawsuit claims Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Google made an illegal deal to slow the pace of their respective AI development.

The lawsuit, which was filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, argues that the leading AI companies violated antitrust laws when they agreed to coordinate slowdown efforts, and that doing so would reduce the value consumers get for paid AI subscriptions.

The coordination largely took place on Sept. 12, the lawsuit argues, when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging for industrywide cooperation on decelerating advancements in favor of enhanced safety measures. That same day, OpenAI's Sam Altman, SpaceXAI's Elon Musk and Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis each publicly responded to Amodei's proposals in agreement.

It's clear that an agreement among the chief rivals in AI that their progress “should be slower than competition would otherwise produce has an anticompetitive effect on consumers,” the plaintiffs argue.

Lawyers representing four named plaintiffs, who pay for subscriptions to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok or Gemini, are bringing the suit on behalf of a proposed nationwide class of other paid subscribers to those services.

“AI will quickly spin out of human control and could kill us all if we allow AI safety and protocol ... to be controlled by private self-serving agreements between the world’s most powerful ‘for profit’ technology companies,” said Nick Rowley, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs.

Representatives for Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and SpaceXAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday.

In his initial essay proposing the slowdown, Amodei acknowledged potential antitrust challenges, writing that it would be helpful for the US government to mediate “or at least enable” these cross-lab discussions. The government wouldn't need to participate, he wrote, but would need to “issue a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations.”

In response, Altman said on social media that OpenAI welcomes the idea of a “federal framework that sets consistent safety requirements,” but said “we do not believe we need to wait for an anti-trust exemption or legislation to begin the work of providing this confidence.”

While the recent conversations about pacing development were spurred by increasing concerns about AI evading human control, several leaders in the AI space have long talked about developing a shared set of standards or otherwise coordinating to ensure safety efforts remained paramount.

This combination of photos shows CEO & Co-Founder of Anthropic Dario Amodei, top left, on Jan. 23, 2025, CEO of Google DeepMind Demis Hassabis, top right, and CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman, bottom left, on June 17, 2026, and CEO of SpaceXAI Elon Musk, bottom right, on Jan. 22, 2026. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber, Julia Demaree Nikhinson)