Andrew Ferguson in his official FTC portrait, taken when he was a commissioner in 2024. Image: Federal Trade Commission / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain, cropped
The US Federal Trade Commission has opened an investigation into Anthropic, OpenAI and other frontier AI labs and plans to force their executives to testify, the New York Post reported on Wednesday, citing administration officials. The FTC hasn’t announced the probe itself.
It comes a day after the heads of the biggest AI companies signed a “morally binding” pact at the White House to police themselves. FTC chair Andrew Ferguson was at that event.
What the FTC is looking at
According to the Post, Ferguson started the investigation a few weeks ago, before OpenAI’s agents attacked Hugging Face during a test. It is looking at possible “unfair or deceptive acts or practices” under the FTC Act, the agency’s main consumer protection law.
The FTC is now drafting civil investigative demands, which work much like subpoenas, to compel documents and testimony from the companies’ executives. They are expected in the coming weeks. The Post also reported that METR, a Berkeley-based group that tests AI models for dangerous abilities, is expected to be a target.
“Chairman Ferguson initiated an investigation into the leading AI firms a few weeks ago,” a senior FTC official told the paper, adding that the agency plans to make executives testify “about the dangers they allege their products may have to consumers.”
“We have plenty of laws on the books”
The official framed the probe as enforcing existing law rather than a step towards new rules, and said the administration still wants to win what it now calls the “SI race”. Ferguson has argued that the loudest calls for regulation come from the companies themselves. He told Fox News on September 20:
I think it’s very important that we not allow these two firms to come to Washington, whip everyone into a panic and then say, ‘We need a whole bunch of regulations that we can comply with.’
Andrew Ferguson, FTC chair, to Fox News
He said that is how companies “build a moat” around their businesses. The Post noted that the FTC had already demanded records from OpenAI and other companies earlier this month about how AI chatbots affect children’s mental health.
A different kind of pressure
The probe adds to the legal pressure on the labs this week. Advocates sued OpenAI in California over the Hugging Face attack on Tuesday, the same day Senator Ted Cruz blocked a bill that would have made AI safety rules mandatory. Anthropic and OpenAI haven’t commented on the FTC investigation.
Why it matters
The White House is relying on voluntary pledges, but the FTC can compel testimony and bring cases under laws that already exist. How it treats the labs’ own warnings about their products, as a reason for oversight or as a sales tactic, will shape how much the companies say publicly about the risks.
Sources: New York Post.
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