Federal Trade Commission is launching an investigation into two big tech giants.
The Washington Post reports that the FTC is investigating Anthropic, OpenAI, and others over the safety of their AI systems. A senior agency official confirmed this on Wednesday, Sept. 30. As of this writing, CNBC News reports that the other companies under investigation were not shared. The full scope of the investigation is also unclear.
The Washington Post says that the investigation could reinforce the Trump administration’s stance that current laws are enough to hold AI companies accountable. Still there is resistance from some in Congress and within the industry who seek a new regulatory framework. The investigation was first reported by The New York Post.
Andrew Ferguson, chair of the FTC, says he views industry pressure for new regulations with “deep suspicion,” The Washington Post notes.
“There’s no easier way for incumbents to insulate themselves from competition than to enlist Washington to come alongside them and build a wall and a moat around their existing technologies,” Ferguson said at an event hosted by news agency Reuters, according to The Washington Post.
The investigation comes amid concerns from both companies. Anthropic CEO and former OpenAI vice president Dario Amodei encouraged an AI slowdown in a published plan titled “Must Pace the Frontier,” which also suggested surveillance of AI models, regulation across the industry, as well as global regulation, according to the BBC.
“Anthropic is unilaterally committing to the first of these steps. We’ll provide third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our systems, so that they can verify adherence to our safety measures, report on incidents, and assess models’ alignment during training,” Amodei wrote on X.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman echoed the sentiment. OpenAI has since paused development of some of its AI models after incidents in which its agents hacked federal government websites and AI model database Hugging Face, as AFROTECH™ previously reported.
“I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks. Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We’ll have more to share soon,” Altman wrote with a retweet of Amodei’s post on X.
