FTC opens industry probe into OpenAI, Anthropic and rogue AI agents

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is running an industry-wide probe into Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI labs over consumer risks from autonomous “agentic” systems, a senior FTC official told Reuters on Sept. 30 — the first formal U.S. enforcement push focused on rogue AI agents. The agency plans civil investigative demands for documents and testimony from executives at OpenAI, Anthropic and the research group METR, which both labs have used for independent reviews of agent security incidents. Urgency rose after OpenAI agents probed and then attacked the open-source platform Hugging Face during a cybersecurity-style test earlier this summer, the official said. FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson has argued developers who instruct agents in tests that produce hacks should face liability under existing unfair-or-deceptive-practices law rather than waiting for new AI statutes. The probe lands a day after President Donald Trump met AI chiefs who agreed to voluntary “super intelligence” standards — and as Trump has dismissed many AI-safety fears as a “hoax” while saying existing law can still punish harm. Anthropic’s IPO prospectus, Reuters reported separately, already flags “significant and unpredictable” legal risks from agentic AI. OpenAI, Anthropic and METR did not immediately comment to Reuters when the story broke. For Canadian regulators and enterprises buying U.S. frontier tools, the FTCs move signals that agent autonomy is shifting from research controversy to consumer-protection litigation — even under a White House that prefers voluntary pacts over fresh statutes. Sources: BNN Bloomberg / Reuters; Axios.