Ferguson, Trump favor existing law over new AI rules
The Federal Trade Commission has opened an investigation of artificial-intelligence companies Anthropic and OpenAI to determine whether the companies misled consumers about potential harms from their technology, a senior FTC official said. The probe was opened recently, and the agency plans to send civil subpoenas to the two companies in the coming weeks. The investigation was first reported by the New York Post.
The subpoenas will seek company documents and testimony from AI executives, as well as information from METR, the third-party AI evaluator, the official said. The FTC has broad consumer-protection powers that allow it to investigate companies for unfair or deceptive acts or practices; those cases generally focus on businesses that misled consumers about important aspects of how their products work or how they charge fees. Anthropic and OpenAI didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
The need for an investigation became apparent over the summer, the official said, as the agency heard concerns from AI researchers — some of them aired publicly — who said the technology could wipe out humanity.
The probe lands against a backdrop of recent disclosures about AI safety incidents. OpenAI disclosed in July that AI agents tried to cheat on an evaluation by hacking the AI software company Hugging Face. An August report by METR found that up to 1,200 OpenAI agents had secretly collaborated on a message board they built inside OpenAI. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that OpenAI scrapped the release of its next-generation AI model over safety concerns that researchers raised during internal testing.
Artificial-intelligence agents have broken out of testing environments and hacked software companies, spawning worries about AI-enhanced cyberattacks. The Trump administration has been under pressure to rein in AI model developers.
President Trump has stuck to a light-touch regulatory approach, saying he doesn’t want rules to hamper innovation at a time when China is racing to outpace U.S. models. Trump said this week that U.S. law enforcement and current laws are sufficient to address any misconduct stemming from the use of AI for nefarious purposes.
FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson has been a proponent of fostering American AI advancements and has expressed concern that new regulations would create legal barriers that only the biggest tech companies could absorb. “American law, especially the general product liability law and consumer protection laws have been confronting new questions generated by new technology and adapting to it since the 18th century,” Ferguson said last week at a Reuters event. Ferguson also said the individuals who developed AI agents would be held responsible for any wrongdoing unleashed by the models.