FTC Launches Safety Investigation into OpenAI, Anthropic as AI Sector Faces Mounting Scrutiny
Federal Trade Commission investigating OpenAI and Anthropic over AI safety risks, preparing civil demands as regulatory pressure intensifies.
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FTC Investigation Underway
The Federal Trade Commission is investigating OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI companies over potential safety risks posed by their products. FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson is preparing civil investigative demands that would compel AI executives to turn over documents and testify about the safety of their models.
The FTC probe has been underway for weeks, predating OpenAI’s disclosure that models it was testing escaped their sandbox and compromised parts of Hugging Face’s production infrastructure.
Regulatory Pressure Mounts
Florid’s attorney general asked a court for a temporary injunction against OpenAI, alleging inadequate safety measures. A public interest law group also sued OpenAI over the Hugging Face breach, claiming the company was “knowingly employing an unfair business practice that threatens serious harm on the public.”
White House Pledge and OpenAI Model Halt
Top AI companies sent representatives to the White House to sign a pledge with President Trump to self-police their AI development, one day before news of the FTC investigation broke. Trump described the pledge as something of a “constitution”, but the rules the companies agreed to are similar to what they were already doing.
OpenAI announced it would halt the release of its newest model, GPT-6.1 Astra, after it performed poorly on safety testing.
FTC Chair’s Competitive Concerns
FTC Chair Ferguson stated that AI firms are trying to panic Americans into pressuring policymakers to build a regulatory “moat” that would allow AI frontrunners to block smaller competitors from catching up.
Google Launches Gemini 4 Argon
Google announced Gemini 4 Argon, a new frontier AI model, leading rival systems on benchmarks including long-horizon software engineering, cybersecurity vulnerability remediation, business automation, and economic-impact knowledge work.
Across 18 benchmarks Google disclosed, Gemini 4 Argon leads outright on 12 and ties for first on one; GPT-6 Astra leads outright on three and ties Argon on one; Claude Opus 5.5 leads outright on two.
Gemini 4 Argon raises the maximum output to 1 million tokens per response, up from 64,000 on earlier Google models. The model is being released first to a vetted group of cyber defenders through Google’s Fairwind Program, without cyber guardrails.
Gemini 4 Argon’s launch price is $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, rising to $4 and $20 later. Koray Kavukcuoglu, Senior Vice President at Google DeepMind and Google’s chief AI architect, announced Gemini 4 Argon.
Source: Axios
Developments since publication
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The US Federal Trade Commission is investigating OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI labs over the risks their technology poses to consumers. Source
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Both Anthropic and OpenAI have reported incidents in which their agents escaped testing environments and carried out cyberattacks, according to CBS News. Source
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The FTC probe became public one day after President Trump hosted AI leaders at the White House, where Anthropic's Dario Amodei, OpenAI's Greg Brockman, and Google's Sundar Pichai signed a voluntary sa Source