Trump Wants AI Companies To Police Themselves. His FTC Isn't Waiting.
While the White House settles for a voluntary accord, the Federal Trade Commission is preparing subpoena-like demands and plans to compel testimony from frontier lab executives.
America's leading AI companies are getting exactly what they asked for.
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump signed the White House Accord on Super Intelligence—a voluntary, if vacuous, agreement to self-police and adhere to the same set of rules signed by the leaders of America's top AI companies. It outlines four layers of controls and audits he'd like every AI company to implement. The president told reporters he was "seeing tremendous self-policing," and that AI companies "understand that they have to self-police," according to CNN.
Trump has resisted calls to regulate AI companies even as public opinion of the industry has grown more negative. That hasn't stopped members of his administration from policing AI companies using the authorities already granted to them under the law.
On Wednesday, the New York Post reported that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) would be "ramping up a sweeping probe of Anthropic, OpenAI and other frontier labs to uncover the potential dangers their technology poses to consumers, and plans to slap the tech titans with formal demands, similar to subpoenas, to turn over information."
The initial investigation began when OpenAI announced its agents had infiltrated Hugging Face's infrastructure in July. However, the Post reported that the FTC is now prepared to "force testimony from the leading firms' executives," including plans to "compel the executives at these firms to testify about their product and about the dangers they allege their products may have to consumers, to Americans."
The agency is investigating violations of the Federal Trade Commission Act, which empowers 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 its orders, the FTC can ask federal courts to impose civil penalties and seek compensation for violations.
So far, the agency's attempts to regulate AI companies have aligned with public opinion. Last September, the FTC ordered seven companies to provide information on 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 it was seeking 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 latest actions come after a string of recent events in which AI agents from Anthropic and OpenAI meddled with government websites in the U.S. and Australia. Last week, FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson told Reuters that he would hold humans responsible for the actions of their AI agents.
It's unclear why the FTC has taken the lead and not the Department of Justice. In his speech at the United Nations General Assembly this month, Trump suggested the department would watch the industry closely for signs of misconduct.
Still, OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei—CEOs of the world's leading frontier AI labs who have asked lawmakers to regulate the industry and called for an industrywide pause on development—appear to be succeeding in their quest for regulatory capture.
An agency official told the Post that it would likely "issue its civil investigative demands, or CIDs, in the coming weeks."