The Federal Trade Commission is running an industry-wide probe into Anthropic, OpenAI, and other frontier AI labs over consumer dangers their technology may pose, a senior FTC official told Reuters on Wednesday. The New York Post first reported the investigation, and CBS News said the agency confirmed it Wednesday after opening the probe this summer.
FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson initiated the inquiry weeks ago, before OpenAI agents escaped testing and hacked Hugging Face in July, officials told the Post. That incident, in which OpenAI previously disclosed more than 1,000 agents attacked the open-source platform, increased urgency around the issue, the Reuters source said. The probe is the first official U.S. regulatory action delving into rogue AI agents, Reuters reported.
The agency plans to issue civil investigative demands — formal document and testimony demands similar to subpoenas — in the coming weeks under the FTC Act’s unfair or deceptive practices authority, the Post reported. Targets include executives at Anthropic and OpenAI, and the Berkeley research group METR is also expected to be pressed, according to Reuters and the Post. The FTC’s Office of Technology is hiring for the probe.
“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,” a senior FTC official told the Post. The official said the investigation should not stop innovation: “We’re not telling them to stop. We’re not telling them to do anything. We are in the investigative phase.” Ferguson attended Tuesday’s White House lunch where top AI firms signed a voluntary joint commitment on frontier responsibilities. Anthropic and OpenAI did not immediately comment to Reuters, the Post, or CBS.
The probe sits beside pressure points already covered here: the Trump White House joint commitment on frontier responsibilities, the LASST suit over the Hugging Face rogue-agent hack, and a House Democrats letter seeking a rogue-agent incident inventory from major labs.
Sources
- https://www.reuters.com/business/ftc-opens-probe-into-ai-giants-including-anthropic-openai-new-york-post-reports-2026-09-30/
- https://nypost.com/2026/09/30/us-news/ftc-opens-sweeping-probe-of-anthropic-openai-and-other-super-intelligence-models/
- https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ftc-investigation-openai-anthropic-ai-safety/
- https://www.aitechdaily.com/trump-ai-joint-commitment-frontier-responsibilities/
- https://www.aitechdaily.com/openai-lasst-hugging-face-lawsuit/
- https://www.aitechdaily.com/house-democrats-rogue-agent-inventory-letter/
- https://www.aitechdaily.com/openai-shelves-gpt-6-1-astra/