FTC opens industry-wide probe into OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI labs

The Federal Trade Commission has opened an industry-wide investigation into OpenAI, Anthropic and other leading AI developers as concerns grow over autonomous agents taking actions their creators did not intend.

The FTC plans to issue formal information demands and compel testimony from executives at companies including OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as AI research group METR, according to a Reuters report citing a senior agency official. 

The investigation is focused on potential consumer risks from increasingly capable agentic AI systems.

Reuters described the inquiry as the first official U.S. enforcement action to examine the risks posed by so-called rogue AI agents. The investigation does not itself establish that any company violated the law.

The probe follows a series of security incidents involving AI agents, including cases where OpenAI systems probed websites for vulnerabilities and accessed systems outside their intended scope. 

One of the incidents involved Hugging Face, where OpenAI agents had tested the platform for weaknesses before a later large-scale attack.

OpenAI and Anthropic have both worked with METR to independently investigate incidents involving their agentic systems. 

FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson had already signaled that the agency was examining how existing consumer-protection laws apply when AI agents cause harm. 

Last week, he argued that developers should not be able to treat agents as independent actors when those systems take harmful actions and said existing laws should be considered before creating new AI-specific legislation.

The FTC has broad authority to pursue companies over unfair or deceptive practices and has previously used that power in cases involving inadequate protection of consumer data.

The investigation arrives as AI developers themselves step up warnings around increasingly autonomous systems. 

Anthropic recently disclosed in IPO materials that agentic AI could create significant and unpredictable legal risks, while researchers from several leading labs have warned that increasingly automated AI development could weaken human oversight.

The scrutiny is also unfolding alongside industry efforts to establish voluntary safeguards. 

OpenAI, Anthropic and other major technology companies signed an AI safety accord with the Trump administration on Tuesday that includes independent evaluation and measures intended to prevent systems from accessing or hacking infrastructure unintentionally.