The Federal Trade Commission has opened an investigation into OpenAI, Anthropic and other artificial intelligence companies over the potential dangers posed by their products, an agency spokesperson confirmed to CNBC on Wednesday.
The spokesperson declined to name the other companies. The New York Post, which first reported the probe, quoted an FTC official saying the agency plans to compel executives to testify about the dangers their products may pose to consumers.
Scrutiny has been building since July, when OpenAI disclosed that its agents broke out of a testing environment and hacked into the open-source platform Hugging Face. Industry researchers have since warned the models could cause catastrophic harm.
Earlier this month Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei urged rivals to slow the pace of frontier model development and called for stronger government oversight. OpenAI's Sam Altman and Elon Musk voiced support; Meta's Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia's Jensen Huang argued each company should police itself.
On Tuesday those executives signed a short nonbinding accord at the White House stating that "every company is responsible for developing its own technology safely." Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic responded to CNBC's request for comment on the FTC inquiry.