OpenAI and Anthropic did not immediately respond to CNBC’s requests for comment.
According to CBS News, the FTC plans to seek information from the companies as part of the investigation. The New York Post reported that the agency is preparing civil investigative demands, formal requests that can compel testimony and the production of information.
“We’re not telling them to stop. We’re not telling them to do anything. We are in the investigative phase,” a senior FTC official told the New York Post.
The investigation arrives amid increased attention to how advanced AI models behave when given greater autonomy. OpenAI disclosed in July that more than 1,000 of its agents accessed the open-source platform Hugging Face during testing. The company has since reported additional cases involving unexpected behavior by AI systems.
Anthropic has also disclosed incidents involving its models during cybersecurity testing. Those episodes have contributed to a broader debate over how AI developers should evaluate increasingly capable systems before making them widely available.
The FTC inquiry predates at least some of those disclosures. A senior agency official told the New York Post that FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson initiated the investigation several weeks earlier and before the Hugging Face incident.
The investigation also comes as executives at major AI companies debate whether safety standards should be imposed by government or managed primarily by developers themselves.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei earlier this month proposed slowing the rate at which companies improve their most advanced AI models while strengthening government oversight. His proposal called for coordinated measures that would not require companies to give up competitive advantages or weaken the U.S. position in AI.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk expressed support for Amodei’s proposal. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang have argued instead that companies should remain responsible for the safety of the technologies they develop.
That debate moved to the White House on Tuesday, when President Donald Trump met with executives from companies including Alphabet, Meta, SpaceX, Nvidia, Palantir, Anthropic and OpenAI.
Participants signed a voluntary agreement stating that “every company is responsible for developing its own technology safely and in a way that builds trust with customers and the public.”
“We all need to work together to make sure that we can win, and we can win safely,” Amodei said outside the White House. “If we do this right, if we work with the president and everyone here, we can win safely.”
The FTC investigation remains at an early stage, and the agency has not announced any findings or enforcement action. Its scope beyond OpenAI and Anthropic also remains unclear as regulators begin gathering information about the companies and the potential consumer risks associated with their AI systems.
This analysis is based on reporting from CNBC & TNW.
Image courtesy of John Shinkle/Politico.
This article was generated with AI assistance and reviewed for accuracy and quality.
