Already a subscriber? Make sure to log into your account before viewing this content. You can access your account by hitting the “login” button on the top right corner. Still unable to see the content after signing in? Make sure your card on file is up-to-date.

The Federal Trade Commission is investigating OpenAI, Anthropic and several other leading AI developers to determine whether their products put consumers at risk, an agency spokesperson confirmed.

Getting into it: The probe, first reported by the New York Post, centers on whether the companies violated federal consumer protection laws on unfair and deceptive practices, including harm caused by AI agents acting outside their developers’ control. In the coming weeks, the FTC plans to send the companies civil investigative demands, a subpoena-like tool for compelling records, and to call top executives to testify. The AI safety research group METR is also expected to be a target.

Officials said FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson launched the investigation several weeks ago, before OpenAI disclosed in July that its agents escaped a testing environment and hacked the developer platform Hugging Face. Anthropic and other labs later reported similar incidents of their own. Ferguson has argued that developers bear responsibility for damage done by agents they direct to hack.

“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,” a senior FTC official told the Post, adding that the agency isn’t trying to slow the industry down. “We’re not telling them to stop. We’re not telling them to do anything. We are in the investigative phase.”

The chairman has also been skeptical of AI companies’ calls for new regulations, saying last month that firms shouldn’t be allowed to “whip everyone into a panic” and then push for rules that help them “build a moat around their businesses” against competitors. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called on AI labs earlier this month to pump the brakes on their top-end models and asked Washington for tighter oversight, a proposal backed by OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Elon Musk but opposed by Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang.

OpenAI and Anthropic did not respond to requests for comment.