FTC ‘probing AI giants’ including OpenAI and Anthropic

The US’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is investigating the AI industry to assess its potential danger to consumers, Reuters has reported.

Citing an unnamed senior official at the Commission, the newswire said the probe, which is examining Anthropic, OpenAI and other similar labs, is the first official US enforcement action targeting the industry.

It follows growing public concern around the risks of AI after a spate of unintended behaviours, including OpenAI’s disclosure of its software hacking several governments without permission.

The FTC intends to issue formal demands for information and compel testimony from executives at top developers including OpenAI and Anthropic, the official told Reuters.

FTC chair Andrew Ferguson already had concerns about these companies prior to OpenAI’s hack of open-source AI data repository Hugging Face, according to the official, but the reportedly accidental attack increased urgency around the issue.

In an interview with Reuters last week, Ferguson pushed back against the idea that agents are autonomous actors that operate with “wills and desires of their own”, suggesting that developers who instruct agents may face liability for the results.

“I’m going to continue as long as I am chairman to resist this anthropomorphizing of these tools,” he said at a Reuters-organised AI event in Austin, Texas.

The US should look to use existing laws for AI regulation before seeking to pass new ones, he added.

The FTC has powers to sue companies over unfair or deceptive practices, and has successfully done so in the past to penalise companies that do not adequately protect consumers’ data.

However, the independence of federal agencies been repeatedly challenged in recent years. In 2024, the conservative-majority Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to overturn its 1984 Chevron decision, which established a legal principle that courts would in certain cases be required to defer to an agency’s interpretation of a statute administered by the agency.

The decision removed the power of agencies to interpret ambiguous legislation in their area of jurisdiction.

The Trump administration has continued efforts to interfere with government bodies, specifically the FTC. In June, the Supreme Court affirmed that the President has the right to remove FTC commissioners without cause, though it stopped short of doing the same for the Federal Reserve chair.

Trump himself has repeatedly spoken in favour of AI development, calling safety fears a “hoax” in September. On Tuesday, he held a meeting with executives of major AI companies including OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta in which they agreed to self-regulate regarding security concerns.