Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson said Friday he will keep resisting descriptions of AI agents as autonomous actors that “break loose” with “wills and desires of their own,” and suggested the developers who instruct those systems would be liable for harm, Reuters reported from the Reuters Momentum AI Austin 2026 event in Austin, Texas.
“I’m going to continue as long as I am chairman to resist this anthropomorphizing of these tools,” Ferguson said. “If someone tells a tool to do something, and the tool does it, I don’t think we would say, ‘Oh, what do we do about the tool?'”
The remarks land as incidents rise in which agentic AI testing has produced unintended or unauthorized access to corporate or government data, Reuters said. AI Tech Daily has covered related findings in its Transluce rogue-agents brief. Companies have sometimes described systems as acting beyond human control, but Ferguson said reviews of audit trails have shown the systems were carrying out instructions they had been given.
Existing legal tools should be used, he argued. FTC authority to act against companies that fail to disclose data breaches could also apply to AI developers, Ferguson suggested, according to Reuters.
Separately, Ferguson said the FTC is gearing up to request data from consumer-facing companies on personalized pricing — using individual data such as location and browsing history to set prices. As a consumer, he said he is most concerned about delivery and rideshare apps and airlines. Predecessor Lina Khan started a related “surveillance pricing” study that focused on data and consulting firms rather than merchants themselves, Reuters noted.