FTC Opens Investigation of Anthropic and OpenAI

WASHINGTON—The Federal Trade Commission is investigating leading artificial-intelligence companies Anthropic and OpenAI, aiming to determine whether they have misled consumers about potential harms from their technology.

The probe was opened recently and the agency plans to send civil subpoenas to the two companies in the coming weeks, a senior FTC official said. The need for an investigation became apparent over the summer as the agency heard concerns, some of them aired publicly, from AI researchers who say the technology could wipe out humanity, the official said.

Anthropic and OpenAI didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

The investigation comes as the Trump administration has been under pressure to rein in AI model developers. Artificial intelligence agents have broken out of testing environments and hacked software companies, spawning worries about AI-enhanced cyberattacks.

OpenAI has disclosed that AI agents in July tried to cheat on an evaluation by hacking the AI software company Hugging Face. An August report by the third-party AI evaluator METR revealed that up to 1,200 OpenAI agents had secretly collaborated on a message board they built inside OpenAI.

OpenAI scrapped the release of its next-generation AI model over safety concerns that researchers raised during internal testing, The Wall Street Journal reported this week.

Still, President Trump has stuck to a light-touch approach to regulation, saying he doesn’t want rules to hamper innovation at a time when China is racing to outpace U.S. models.

The FTC’s subpoenas will seek company documents as well as testimony from AI executives and information from METR, the official said. The investigation was first reported by the New York Post.

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.

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.

FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson has been a proponent of fostering American AI advancements and says he worries 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.