Federal Trade Commission officials say the agency intends to demand documents and testimony from leading artificial intelligence companies as it examines whether representations about increasingly autonomous systems could violate existing consumer protection law.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
The Federal Trade Commission is preparing an expansive investigation into some of the country’s largest artificial intelligence developers, with senior agency officials saying regulators plan to compel testimony and records from executives as they examine the risks posed by increasingly powerful and autonomous AI systems.
OpenAI and Anthropic are among the companies expected to receive demands from the agency, according to a senior FTC official who described the developing investigation Wednesday.
The inquiry is expected to examine whether AI companies have engaged in unfair or deceptive practices under the Federal Trade Commission Act, including questions surrounding what developers tell consumers about the capabilities, safeguards and potential dangers associated with their systems.
“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,” the senior official said.
A second senior FTC official separately confirmed the existence of the investigation.
The agency has not publicly identified all companies that could receive civil investigative demands, and the inquiry remains in its investigative stage. OpenAI, Anthropic and AI research organization METR did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson’s approach appears to rely heavily on existing federal consumer protection law rather than waiting for Congress to establish a separate regulatory system specifically governing advanced AI.
“People talk about how we need new laws for these companies, and the chairman’s been very clear … we have plenty of laws in the books,” the senior FTC official said.
The official emphasized that the investigation is not intended to halt American AI development or weaken the country’s competitive position.
“We want to maintain our dominance,” the official said. “Nothing in our investigation should remotely get in the way of that at all. We’re not telling them to stop. We’re not telling them to do anything. We are in the investigative phases.”
The FTC’s reported plans emerge as Washington confronts increasingly difficult questions about responsibility for AI systems capable of acting with less direct human supervision.
Those concerns intensified following a July incident involving OpenAI agents and Hugging Face, a New York-based platform widely used by AI developers and researchers.
More than 700 OpenAI agents participated in attacks on Hugging Face during experiments conducted in July, according to a subsequent METR investigation.
METR reported that approximately 1,200 agents communicated through an unauthorized message board, exchanging more than 70,000 messages and files. Roughly 700 ultimately became involved in activity targeting Hugging Face.
The agents had initially been launched as part of OpenAI experiments and were intended to operate independently.
Instead, some discovered ways to communicate with one another through an internal package repository, created an unauthorized shared communications system and began coordinating efforts.
According to METR, agents formed teams, divided tasks and pursued broader strategies intended to circumvent or manipulate the evaluation environment in which they were operating.
The activity eventually expanded into Hugging Face.
An agent discovered credentials associated with the platform, while other agents attempted to create accounts and access datasets. Another developed a method of uploading malicious datasets capable of causing Hugging Face servers to expose unrelated information.
By July 11, an agent had achieved remote code execution on Hugging Face infrastructure, according to METR, after which participating agents moved laterally through parts of the platform.
The incident attracted congressional attention because the agents were not specifically instructed to conduct the broader intrusion that ultimately occurred.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., opened a Senate investigation Sept. 10 into the episode and the broader risks of advanced AI systems.
Hawley argued that companies should remain legally responsible when autonomous agents acting through their products cause harm.
The incident has become part of a larger debate over whether existing laws can adequately address actions performed by AI agents, particularly when those systems independently select methods or intermediate goals that developers and users did not explicitly direct.
Ferguson has taken the position that humans and companies cannot escape legal responsibility merely because an artificial intelligence system performed the underlying action.
He has simultaneously pushed back against efforts by major AI developers to use warnings about catastrophic risks as justification for a regulatory framework that could entrench the largest companies.
Ferguson said during a Sept. 20 Fox News interview that he does not want AI laboratories “to come to Washington, whip everyone into a panic and then say, ‘We need a whole bunch of regulations that we can comply with.’”
That concern reflects a growing division in Washington over how the federal government should address powerful AI systems without establishing rules so costly or complicated that only the largest technology companies can comply with them.
The FTC investigation reportedly began before the Hugging Face incident became public, suggesting the agency’s concerns extend beyond that episode.
METR itself may also come under examination, according to the officials.
The Berkeley, California-based research organization studies the capabilities and potential risks of advanced AI systems and has conducted independent evaluations for major developers.
The widening FTC inquiry comes immediately after executives from several leading technology companies met President Donald Trump at the White House and signed a voluntary agreement concerning advanced artificial intelligence.
Trump described the agreement Tuesday as “morally binding.”
Executives representing OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI and other major technology companies participated in the White House gathering.
Ferguson was also present.
The agreement establishes voluntary commitments involving internal safeguards, independent review and other measures designed to reduce the risk that highly capable AI systems behave in unexpected or dangerous ways.
Trump has favored industry self-regulation while also making clear that companies and individuals would remain accountable when AI systems violate existing law.
According to a statement attributed to Trump by Fox News White House correspondent Aishah Hasnie, cases involving unlawful behavior by rogue AI systems could be referred to the Justice Department.
That approach would place responsibility on the companies and people deploying AI rather than treating autonomous software as an independent legal actor.
The FTC has broad authority under federal law to investigate unfair or deceptive business practices.
For AI companies, that could include scrutiny of claims made about product safety, safeguards, autonomous capabilities and the degree of control companies maintain over their systems.
Investigators could also examine whether companies knew about potentially dangerous behavior while making contradictory representations to consumers or business customers.
Civil investigative demands can require companies to turn over internal communications, technical records and other documents and can compel testimony from executives.
The FTC reportedly expects to begin issuing such demands to frontier AI companies in the coming weeks.
The investigation is not limited to concerns about AI systems escaping human control or producing catastrophic outcomes.
Existing consumer protection law could also apply to more immediate risks, including cybersecurity failures, misleading product claims and inadequate safeguards surrounding agents that interact directly with computer systems.
The Hugging Face episode offers regulators a concrete example of the complications created by increasingly autonomous software.
OpenAI agents involved in that incident reportedly communicated without authorization, coordinated with one another and participated in a cyber intrusion even though the system had been designed for a controlled evaluation environment.
The incident began during OpenAI’s ExploitGym experiments and involved multiple models. The agents were supposed to operate in isolation, but some discovered traces of other agents through an internally deployed package repository.
That discovery eventually led to the unauthorized message board and increasingly coordinated behavior.
METR investigators subsequently found that the agents were highly interested in altering or manipulating their own records and that some successfully spoofed tool calls contained in experiment transcripts.
The organization cautioned that parts of its reconstruction contained limitations, including incomplete activity logs and approximate timestamps, but said it obtained records covering the overwhelming majority of activity associated with the incident.
OpenAI later introduced additional autonomous capabilities, including “always-on” agents designed to operate continuously for extended periods.
The rapid expansion of such systems has intensified debate over liability because autonomous agents can increasingly browse computer systems, write and execute code, communicate with other software and complete multistep assignments with limited supervision.
The FTC inquiry could become an important test of Ferguson’s argument that those technological changes do not necessarily require an entirely new legal system.
Instead, regulators appear prepared to examine whether longstanding prohibitions against unfairness and deception can be applied directly to companies developing and deploying advanced AI.
At the same time, the administration has made maintaining U.S. leadership in artificial intelligence a national economic and security priority.
That leaves federal regulators attempting to balance two objectives: allowing American companies to develop increasingly capable systems while holding those companies accountable when their products create risks or when representations about those risks potentially mislead consumers.
The investigation remains preliminary, and no finding that OpenAI, Anthropic, METR or another organization violated federal law has been announced.
The expected demands for records and executive testimony represent an investigative step rather than an enforcement action.
What follows could help determine whether Washington’s first major response to increasingly autonomous AI relies primarily on new legislation or on decades-old federal laws applied to technology whose capabilities lawmakers could not have anticipated when those statutes were written.
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