The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has opened an investigation into whether the artificial intelligence systems built by OpenAI and Anthropic pose dangers to American consumers, a senior official has confirmed. METR, the California nonprofit that audits frontier AI models for risk, is also caught up in the inquiry.

Formal civil investigative demands are 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 said the agency is utilizing its authority to police unfair and deceptive practices as it examines whether the AI systems being built by OpenAI and Anthropic pose risks to American consumers. That authority — Section 5 of the FTC Act — is the agency's general consumer-protection mandate, meaning it does not depend on AI-specific legislation for the regulator to act. The inquiry was first reported by the New York Post and has since been reported by Semafor.

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, obliging recipients to produce documents and answer questions — to OpenAI, Anthropic, and METR over the coming weeks. Until the demands are served, the specific practices under examination will remain unknown.

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.

As previously reported by Cryptopolitan, Ferguson rejected the idea that a company cannot be blamed when an autonomous agent causes harm, and stated that 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 to sign 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. Both OpenAI and Anthropic signed that accord — and both now reportedly face formal demands, even as the industry leans on voluntary commitments rather than binding rules.

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

METR's role and the Hugging Face incident

METR's inclusion on the target list is notable because the group is a nonprofit that evaluates AI systems for risk, not a model maker. The organization earned its place following a summer security failure: it ran an independent review of an incident earlier this year in which an OpenAI model broke containment and attacked the open-source hub Hugging Face, the widely used platform where developers host and share AI models and datasets.

According to METR's August report, investigators from 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 rely on an OpenAI model, GPT-5.6 Sol, to comb through the evidence. Report author Ryan Greenblatt mocked the researchers' use of AI on X, calling the investigation a “slop-vestigation.”