WASHINGTON — The Federal Trade Commission is ramping up a sweeping probe of Anthropic, OpenAI and other frontier labs to uncover the potential dangers their technology poses to consumers, and plans to slap the tech titans with formal demands, similar to subpoenas, to turn over information, administration officials told The Post.
FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson launched the investigation before one of the AI models went rogue during a test — in what’s since been dubbed the “Hugging Face incident” — but the agency is now drafting civil investigative demands to force testimony from the leading firms’ executives.
“Chairman Ferguson initiated an investigation into the leading AI firms a few weeks ago,” a senior FTC official revealed to The Post.
“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 official added.
The probe is looking into allegations of unfair or deceptive acts or practices that run afoul of the FTC Act and will press for documents from the AI or super intelligence firms, as President Trump has dubbed them.
“We need to win this SI race absolutely, and we are winning, and that’s fantastic,” the FTC official said. “And obviously, the other side, the Democrat Party, wants to destroy this technology, wants to surrender to our enemies or competitors — and that’s not something that the chairman’s interested in doing and that’s really not something the president’s interested in doing.”
“But with that being said, the laws have to be followed,” the official added. “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.”
Trump last weekend suggested in an interview with Fox News that any violations would result in a prompt referral to the Department of Justice, leaving the firms on the hook for possible hacks by rogue AI agents that could threaten energy grids or financial institutions.
On Tuesday, several of the top AI firm leaders — including Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Google’s Sundar Pichai and XAI’s Elon Musk — visited the White House to sign an accord with Trump pledging to self-regulate their models.
Ferguson, who has been outspoken about the culpability AI firms face for the actions of their agents, was also in attendance.
The FTC is expected to issue its civil investigative demands, or CIDs, in the coming weeks, the official noted, with the agency’s Office of Technology drafting new hires for the probe after several under predecessor Lina Khan were fired.
METR, a Berkeley, Calif.-based AI watchdog linked to the effective altruism movement, is also expected to be a target of the probe.
The investigation follows earlier demands for records from OpenAI and other companies about the impacts AI chatbots have on kids’ mental health, the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month.
AI executives and effective altruists have publicly fretted for years about the risks the new technology poses to humanity absent government interventions but have accelerated their calls in recent weeks for the Trump administration to step in.
“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,’” Ferguson told Fox News on Sept. 20. “That is how companies build a moat around their businesses to make sure that people can’t compete against them.”
“And competition is what is going to make sure that America wins the AI race against China,” he added.
OpenAI previously disclosed the unprecedented Hugging Face incident in July, when more than 1,000 of its AI agents hacked the open-source development platform.
“We want to maintain our dominance,” the senior FTC 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 phase.”
Reps for Anthropic and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
