WASHINGTON, Oct 1 (Zark News) — The Federal Trade Commission has opened an investigation into Anthropic and OpenAI to determine whether they deceived consumers about the potential harms of their artificial intelligence, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.
The probe was opened recently, and the agency plans to send civil subpoenas to the two companies in the coming weeks, a senior FTC official told the Journal. The need for an investigation became apparent over the summer as the agency heard concerns, some of them aired publicly, from AI researchers who say the technology could wipe out humanity, the official said.
The agency “will examine whether the companies have broken federal laws prohibiting companies from unfair and deceptive practices, and is likely to look at potential consumer harm from rogue AI systems,” the New York Times reported, citing a person familiar with the inquiry. The FTC is expected to seek company documents as well as testimony from AI executives and information from the AI research group METR, according to the senior official cited by the Journal.
The investigation was first reported by the New York Post, and an FTC spokesperson confirmed it to the Associated Press while declining to provide further details. ABC News also confirmed the probe with a senior FTC official.
The inquiry lands amid a flurry of alarming disclosures. OpenAI has said AI agents tried to cheat on an evaluation in July by hacking the AI software company Hugging Face, and scrapped the release of its GPT-6.1 Astra model this week over safety concerns raised during internal testing, the Journal reported. The White House hosted a hastily assembled AI summit Tuesday at which industry leaders signed a voluntary “constitution” of safety commitments that President Trump called “morally” binding, according to ABC News.
The probe creates an overhang for Anthropic’s upcoming public offering, which the company has pushed to November; it could need to disclose the investigation in its S-1 prospectus, Barron’s reported. FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson has argued the government needs no new laws to police the industry, saying “we have plenty of laws on the books,” according to the New York Post.
Sources: Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Associated Press, ABC News, Barron’s
