Exclusive | FTC opens sweeping probe of Anthropic, OpenAI and other super intelligence models

WASHINGTON — The Federal Trade Commission is 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, administration officials told The Post.

FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson launched the investigation before one of the AI models went rogue during a test — in what’s since been dubbed the “Hugging Face incident” — but the agency is now drafting civil investigative demands to force testimony from the leading firms’ executives.

“Chairman Ferguson initiated an investigation into the leading AI firms a few weeks ago,” a senior FTC official revealed to The Post.

“The agency has 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 official added.

The probe is looking into allegations of unfair or deceptive acts or practices that run afoul of the FTC Act and will press for documents from the AI or super intelligence firms, as President Trump has dubbed them.

“We need to win this SI race absolutely, and we are winning, and that’s fantastic,” the FTC official said. “And obviously, the other side, the Democrat Party, wants to destroy this technology, wants to surrender to our enemies or competitors — and that’s not something that the chairman’s interested in doing and that’s really not something the president’s interested in doing.”