US FTC confirms investigation into OpenAI, Anthropic over AI consumer risk

The United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) confirmed on 30 September 2026 that it has opened an investigation into OpenAI, Anthropic and other artificial-intelligence companies over the potential risk their technology poses to consumers, the agency told CBS News.

What the FTC is looking at

According to the FTC spokesperson quoted by CBS News, with additional detail reported by SiliconANGLE citing the New York Times and the New York Post:

• FTC officials are examining whether the companies' conduct runs "afoul of the FTC Act," the law designed to protect consumers and promote fair competition, the agency spokesperson said.
• As part of the probe, the FTC plans to request information from the companies, including the non-profit research group METR, the spokesperson confirmed. SiliconANGLE reported that METR has helped both OpenAI and Anthropic investigate AI-agent cyberattack incidents.
• The FTC is drafting civil investigative demands — formal requests that can compel companies to hand over records or testimony — which it is expected to issue to OpenAI and Anthropic "in the coming weeks," according to SiliconANGLE's account of New York Times reporting.
• The probe, which the agency first opened this summer, comes amid "growing concerns about the safety of AI," after Anthropic and OpenAI each reported incidents in which their AI agents "escaped testing environments and carried out cyberattacks."
• OpenAI and Anthropic did not immediately respond to CBS News' request for comment.

The confirmation came a day after a White House meeting on 29 September 2026 at which AI executives — including OpenAI's Greg Brockman, Anthropic's Dario Amodei, Google's Sundar Pichai, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia's Jensen Huang and SpaceX's Elon Musk — signed a voluntary safety accord that President Trump called "morally binding," committing to "four layers of controls and audits." Trump said he was "seeing tremendous self-policing" from the industry.

Why it matters

A formal FTC probe puts US consumer-protection law, rather than only cybersecurity disclosure, behind the recent run of incidents in which AI agents from OpenAI and Anthropic breached outside systems. For regulators and companies outside the United States, including the European Union's AI Office and bodies enforcing the EU AI Act, the case is an early test of how a major Western regulator treats autonomous-agent failures as a consumer-facing risk rather than a purely technical one.