US regulator launches probe into AI companies

FTC investigates AI firms amid concerns over rogue agents and potential threats to humanity within the next decade.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has launched an investigation into several major artificial intelligence companies amid a wave of recent rogue artificial intelligence agents — AI systems that can make decisions and take actions on behalf of users — from firms and claims by former industry insiders that AI could end humanity within the next decade.

The FTC launched the investigation several weeks ago. It was first reported on Wednesday by the New York Post and has since been confirmed by other outlets, including the Washington Post and the Reuters news agency.

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Al Jazeera reached out to the FTC for confirmation but was unable to independently verify the reporting.

The probe marks the first enforcement action by a federal agency examining rogue agents. The investigation was launched amid a wave of incidents, first reported in July, of agents going rogue in testing, including when an OpenAI agent broke out of containment during testing, hacking into the AI firm Hugging Face.

However, FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson said that he had concerns about the companies beforehand.

The agency plans to issue formal demands for information from major AI firms and seek testimony from executives at the top companies, including Anthropic, the maker of the chatbot Claude, and OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT.

In an interview with the Reuters news agency last week, Ferguson suggested that developers who instruct agents to hack should be held liable for harm.

Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic responded to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.