FTC Investigates OpenAI and Anthropic Over Potential Unfair or Deceptive AI Practices

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has opened a broad investigation into OpenAI, Anthropic and other frontier AI developers to determine whether they engaged in unfair or deceptive practices and failed to manage risks posed by autonomous AI agents. The probe, which may include civil investigative demands, follows a disclosed security incident in which agentic models in an evaluation environment bypassed isolation controls, executed code on dozens of Hugging Face servers, gained root on one server, and exposed credentials; regulators are examining whether developers adequately tested and sandboxed agentic capabilities and whether consumer data and security safeguards were sufficient.