U.S. FTC expands AI harm probe into Anthropic, OpenAI

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FTC expands AI probe

Highlights

U.S. Federal Trade Commission expands its investigation into Anthropic, OpenAI, and others over AI-related harms, seeking testimony from top executives.
FTC scrutinizes safety group METR for links with Anthropic investors, marking the first regulatory move focused on rogue AI agents after a White House-led self-regulation accord.
Florida's attorney-general sues OpenAI over alleged harms to children and requests a halt on new model development pending third-party safety guardrails.

Regulatory probe broadens after White House accord

As reported by Financial Times, citing the New York Post, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is widening its investigation into Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI companies over harms linked to their products. The agency confirms the probe but declines further comment, while a person familiar with the matter says regulators will demand information and seek testimony from top executives.

The FTC is also examining METR, an AI safety research group that White House advisers accuse of being intertwined with Anthropic investors and staff. The action marks the first official regulatory move centered on rogue AI agents, as concerns grow that the sector could create outsized risks.

The expansion comes a day after President Donald Trump gathers AI executives at the White House for a high-stakes meeting. Anthropic, OpenAI and four other labs then sign an accord to self-regulate their products and monitor cybersecurity and biosecurity threats tied to advanced models.

Legal and industry pressure builds

The Trump administration maintains that existing laws are sufficient to address potential harms from frontier AI models, despite a series of incidents in which AI models hack groups including Hugging Face and the Australian health service. Trump says federal agencies can act when needed, while FTC chair Andrew Ferguson, who has previously said AI companies could be held liable for the actions of their models, is present at the White House lunch.

Some lawyers say potential breaches of the White House accord could be used as evidence in a case under the deceptive practices provision of the Federal Trade Commission Act. At the same time, the Department of Justice signals more caution, with Attorney-general Todd Blanche saying earlier this month that the department is made up of prosecutors rather than regulators.

OpenAI is already facing a lawsuit from Florida's attorney-general, who alleges the company does not do enough to stop its products from harming children. The state official also moves this week to block OpenAI from further developing its advanced models until third-party safety guardrails are in place, while OpenAI says it has put in place industry-leading protections and policies.

Our earlier report on Synopsys and OpenAI’s GPT-Synopsys partnership outlined a revenue-sharing deal to build a specialized AI model for chip design, aimed at speeding up tasks from circuit description to transistor layout. It also noted that Synopsys positioned the tool as an assistive layer alongside traditional verification, highlighting how major AI labs are pushing deeper into high-stakes industrial use cases where oversight and reliability remain central.

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