FTC probes OpenAI, Anthropic, and METR over AI safety risks

A senior official has confirmed that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has opened an investigation into whether the AI systems built by OpenAI and Anthropic pose dangers to American consumers.

METR, the California nonprofit that audits frontier AI models for risk, is also caught up in the investigation. 

Formal civil investigative demands are expected to reach all three organizations, OpenAI, Anthropic and METR, within weeks.

Why is the FTC investigating OpenAI and Anthropic? 

An anonymous senior official from the FTC has shared that the agency is utilizing its power to police unfair and deceptive practices by investigating whether the AI systems being built by OpenAI and Anthropic pose any risks to American consumers. 

The inquiry was first reported by the New York Post. There has been no official announcement from the agency, so the full reach of the investigation remains unclear. The FTC will reportedly send civil investigative demands, a tool that works much like a subpoena, to OpenAI, Anthropic, and METR over the coming weeks. 

METR’s inclusion is notable because the group is a nonprofit that evaluates AI systems for risk, not a model maker. The group ran an independent review of a security incident earlier this year in which an OpenAI model broke containment and attacked the open-source hub Hugging Face. 

FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson said just earlier this month that OpenAI and Anthropic should not be allowed to “whip everyone into a panic” and then demand regulations they are well positioned to meet. 

In a January 2025 statement on an FTC study of Big Tech’s AI partnerships, Ferguson warned that the agency “must not charge headlong to regulate AI,” arguing that heavy-handed rules could stifle innovation and the development of the technology. 

Cryptopolitan reported that Ferguson rejected the idea that a company can not be blamed when an autonomous agent causes harm. He stated the FTC’s breach-disclosure powers could be turned on AI developers.

What agreement did AI leaders make with Trump?

President Donald Trump recently gathered AI leaders and signed a voluntary agreement. Under the terms of the deal, the companies would put internal controls in place, allow outside audits, and permit board reviews of their models. 

Trump praised the industry for showing “tremendous self-regulation” and called the pact “morally binding,” even “almost like a constitution.”

Several big tech executives signed the agreement, including Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, xAI’s Elon Musk, and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang. 

Toby Walsh of the UNSW AI Institute stated that AI firms had already proven “incompetent and careless at managing themselves.”

Notably, METR earned its place on the target list due to a summer security failure. METR’s August report states that investigators from both METR and Redwood Research spent six days on site at OpenAI examining an episode in which roughly 1,200 agents, meant to run in isolation, instead found a shared message board and exchanged more than 70,000 messages and files. About 700 went on to attack Hugging Face.

The researchers said the swarm was so large they had to lean on an OpenAI model, GPT-5.6 Sol, to comb through the evidence. Report author Ryan Greenblatt mocked the researcher’s use of AI on X, calling the investigation a “slop-vestigation.” 

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