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.
Why it matters: This is the first formal federal enforcement action aimed at the leading AI labs, and it arrives while the White House is pushing voluntary self-regulation. For anyone handing an AI agent real credentials at work, the July Hugging Face incident is the case study.
- 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.
Yes, but: On Tuesday the same executives signed a short nonbinding White House accord stating that "every company is responsible for developing its own technology safely." Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had urged rivals this month to slow frontier development, while Meta and Nvidia argued each company should police itself.
What's next: OpenAI's Sam Altman and Elon Musk voiced support for Amodei's call for stronger government oversight. Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic responded to CNBC's request for comment on the FTC inquiry.
