Does artificial intelligence pose a real threat to the American public?
A potentially far-reaching Federal Trade Commission probe into Anthropic, OpenAI, and other top AI labs is shifting into high gear to find out.
According to a senior FTC official who spoke to USA TODAY on the condition of anonymity, the agency launched the investigation before the rash of rogue agent incidents but plans in coming weeks to intensify that inquiry, using civil investigative demands – similar to subpoenas – to obtain more information and compel executives to testify.
The probe is the first official enforcement action to target the actions of rogue agents. The July "Hugging Face incident" and subsequent breaches sparked fears that AI could harm humans.
"This is a
sweeping and significant probe," the senior FTC official told USA TODAY.
Specifically, the probe will turn on whether the companies engaged in deceptive or unfair business practices that violate the FTC Act, the federal law enacted in 1914 that established the agency and gave it broad powers to protect consumers and maintain fair business competition. The FTC has used this authority in the past against companies that did not secure consumers’ data.
The probe also includes METR (Model Evaluation & Threat Research), an independent nonprofit research organization that evaluates artificial intelligence models for dangerous autonomous capabilities. Anthropic and OpenAI have used METR to conduct independent investigations into breaches.
Anthropic, OpenAI and METR did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Top tech executives including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Google’s Sundar Pichai and xAI’s Elon Musk recently met with President Donald Trump at the White House to sign a voluntary self-regulation pledge for their AI models.
Rogue attacks like Hugging Face when AI agents swarmed and hacked the open-source development platform have alarmed Americans and gotten the attention of regulators. Under the Biden administration, the FTC also launched an inquiry into possible AI harms.
"The agency has plans to compel the executives at these firms to testify about their product [and] about the dangers they allege their products may have to consumers, to Americans," an FTC official told the New York Post, which first reported on the probe.
FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson told Reuters that developers who instruct agents in cybersecurity tests that result in hacks should be held liable.
In recent weeks, leading AI executives have intensified calls for federal intervention, urging the Trump administration to establish national guardrails. Ferguson has pushed back, accusing AI companies of whipping up panic to secure regulations that benefit them.
"That is how companies build a moat around their businesses to make sure that people can’t compete against them," Ferguson told Fox News on Sept. 20. And, competition, Ferguson said, is the key "to make sure that America wins the AI race against China."
The Trump administration has largely stayed out of the way, also citing the need to win the AI race with China. But Trump has threatened prosecution of AI companies for breaches of power grids and banking infrastructure.
“We will be careful and that’s why we have the Department of Justice, and other Law Enforcement bodies, that will rein things in if we have to,” he wrote in a post on Truth Social.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: FTC intensifies OpenAI, Anthropic probe following 'rogue AI' attacks
