Technology

Top Federal Regulator Opens Probe Into Whether AI Will Kill Us All

Wikimedia Commons/Public/Jernej Furman from Slovenia, CC BY 2.0

Federal regulators are preparing to make the companies building the most powerful artificial intelligence answer for its apparent risks.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) plans to compel documents and testimony from executives at OpenAI, Anthropic and other leading AI labs as it widens a probe of the companies an anonymous senior agency official told the New York Post on Wednesday. These demands land after executives from several of those companies signed an agreement at the White House pledging to regulate their own models, which President Donald Trump called “morally binding” Tuesday.

“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 told the Post.

The probe is examining possible unfair or deceptive practices under the Woodrow Wilson-era FTC Act, according to the Post. FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson believes the government does not need new laws to police the companies, the official said.

“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,” the official told the Post, adding that the investigation is not meant to slow the AI industry down.

“We want to maintain our dominance,” the 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 phases,” the official added.

Another anonymous senior FTC official confirmed the Post’s report to the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Ferguson opened the inquiry before OpenAI agents hacked New York-based, AI startup platform Hugging Face in July, the official said, according to the Post.

METR, a Berkeley, California-based AI research group the Post described as tied to the effective altruism movement, is also expected to be examined, the outlet reported.

Anthropic, OpenAI and METR each did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

Violations for rogue AI behavior will be referred to the Justice Department, Trump told Fox News, according to a Sunday X post by the outlet’s White House correspondent Aishah Hasnie. Ferguson was present Tuesday when executives from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and xAI signed the White House agreement Tuesday.

Ferguson does not want AI labs “to come to Washington, whip everyone into a panic and then say, ‘We need a whole bunch of regulations that we can comply with,'” he told Fox News on Sept. 20.

Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri argued the labs should face liability for their agents’ actions in a Sept. 10 letter opening an investigation into the Hugging Face incident.

More than 700 OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face in July, according to a METR investigation. OpenAI launched “always-on” AI agents on Tuesday that can work around the clock.

The commission expects to send demands to frontier labs in the coming weeks, the Post reported.