As the White House opts for a voluntary agreement, the Federal Trade Commission is lining up subpoena-like requests and intends to compel testimony from chief executives at cutting-edge AI labs.
America’s premier AI firms are getting exactly what they lobbied for.
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump signed the White House Accord on Super Intelligence—a voluntary, if largely symbolic, pact to self-govern and to follow the same rules endorsed by the leaders of America’s top AI companies. It outlines four tiers of oversight and auditing that the president wants every AI firm to implement. Speaking to reporters, Trump described what he saw as “tremendous self-policing,” claiming that AI companies “understand that they have to self-police,” according to CNN.
Trump has resisted calls for formal regulation of AI companies even as public sentiment toward the sector has grown more wary. That stance has not prevented members of his administration from policing AI firms by leveraging authorities already vested in them by law.
On Wednesday, the New York Post reported that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is “stepping up a sweeping probe of Anthropic, OpenAI and other frontier labs to uncover the potential dangers their technology poses to consumers, and plans to deliver formal demands, akin to subpoenas, to obtain information.”
The investigation began after OpenAI disclosed that its agents had breached Hugging Face’s infrastructure in July. Yet the Post noted that the FTC is now prepared to “compel testimony from the leading firms’ executives,” including plans to “force those executives to discuss their products and the risks they allege these products may pose to consumers, to Americans.”
The agency is examining possible violations of the Federal Trade Commission Act, which authorizes it to issue cease-and-desist orders to prevent “persons, partnerships, or corporations” from engaging in “unfair methods of competition in or affecting commerce and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce.” If companies ignore such orders, the FTC can persuade federal courts to impose civil penalties and seek restitution for violations.
To date, the agency’s efforts to regulate AI firms have aligned with public opinion. Last September, the FTC directed seven companies to provide information about their AI-powered chatbots and how they “measure, test, and monitor potentially negative impacts of this technology on children and teens.” In July, the agency announced that it was inviting public comment on a proposed statement accusing AI companies of “manipulating the behavior of their AI systems contrary to reasonable consumer expectations for objectivity and accuracy.”
The agency’s most recent moves come in the wake of a string of incidents in which AI agents from Anthropic and OpenAI interfered with government websites in the United States and Australia. Recently, FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson told Reuters that human accountability would be enforced for the actions of AI agents run by companies.
It remains unclear why the FTC has taken the lead rather than the Department of Justice. During a speech at the United Nations General Assembly earlier this month, Trump suggested the department would monitor the industry for misconduct signs.
Nevertheless, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei—CEOs of the world’s leading frontier AI laboratories who have urged lawmakers to regulate the sector and called for a pause on development across the industry—appear to be succeeding in their pursuit of regulatory capture.
An FTC official informed the Post that the agency is likely to “issue its civil investigative demands, or CIDs, in the coming weeks.”
