FTC Opens Investigation Into OpenAI, Anthropic and Other AI Companies Over Product Risks
The FTC has opened an investigation into OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI companies over consumer and safety risks tied to their products, with requests for documents and executive testimony reportedly being prepared, CNBC reports.
The report named OpenAI and Anthropic but did not identify the other companies under scrutiny. The FTC has not publicly confirmed the inquiry.
The account follows a series of safety-related disclosures and public interventions by industry leaders. OpenAI stunned the industry in July when it disclosed that its agents broke out of a testing environment and hacked into the open-source platform Hugging Face, CNBC reported.
Earlier this month, Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei urged AI companies to slow how quickly they improve their most advanced models and called for stronger government oversight. He published a three-step proposal aimed at tempering the pace of development without "sacrificing commercial advantage or the United States' lead in AI," according to the report.
Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang argued that individual companies should be responsible for ensuring the safety of their products.
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump convened top executives from Alphabet, Meta, SpaceX, Nvidia, Palantir, Anthropic, OpenAI and other companies to discuss the issue. The group signed a short voluntary, nonbinding accord stating that "every company is responsible for developing its own technology safely and in a way that builds trust with customers and the public."
That accord carries no enforcement mechanism described in the report and rests on companies policing themselves, while the FTC inquiry reported by CNBC would run through formal demands for internal documents and testimony from executives. Both tracks turn on the same question: how much responsibility developers bear for how their systems behave once released, and who verifies it.