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The US Federal Trade Commission is investigating top American AI labs — and a prominent safety watchdog — over the potential dangers of their technology.
An FTC official confirmed the probe, first reported by the New York Post. The investigation was launched before an unreleased OpenAI model went rogue and hacked open-source AI hub Hugging Face earlier this year, an incident that triggered a fresh wave of concern over the possible harms of uninhibited AI development.
In addition to labs, including OpenAI and Anthropic, METR, a California-based nonprofit that evaluates frontier AI models for risks, is also a target. METR conducted an investigation into the OpenAI-Hugging Face hack and released a report on the incident.
The agency is set to send civil investigative demands, which are similar to subpoenas, to the companies in the next few weeks.
OpenAI, Anthropic, and METR didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
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The probe steps up US government scrutiny of top tech companies, even as executives from many of those companies gathered at the White House this week and signed a voluntary pledge to self-police their AI models. US President Donald Trump said the industry was showing “tremendous self-regulation.”
FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson earlier this month signaled opposition to government regulation driven by AI safety fears, telling Fox News that OpenAI and Anthropic shouldn’t be able to “whip everyone into a panic and then say, ‘We need a whole bunch of regulations that we can comply with.’”
He added: “That is how companies build a moat around their businesses to make sure that people can’t compete against them.”