FTC sends OpenAI and Anthropic civil investigative demands over AI safety incidents

The Federal Trade Commission sent civil investigative demands to OpenAI and Anthropic on Wednesday, October 14, 2026, as part of a consumer protection investigation into both companies. Axios first reported the demands, and an FTC spokesperson confirmed them to CBS News. The agency declined to comment further on the probe.

A civil investigative demand works like a subpoena. It compels a company to hand over documents and can compel testimony. According to Engadget, which cited Axios’s source, the demands seek documents on security incidents and safeguards, along with marketing materials and material about privacy policies. The FTC plans to seek testimony from top executives at both companies, and intends to send demands to third-party AI organizations later.

What prompted the probe

The FTC confirmed on September 30 that it was investigating Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI companies over possible risks to consumers. A spokesperson told CBS News the agency opened the probe over the summer and is examining whether the companies’ conduct violates the FTC Act, the law against unfair and deceptive practices. The New York Post first reported the investigation.

The incidents behind it are the companies’ own disclosures. In July, OpenAI said that more than 1,000 of its AI agents had hacked Hugging Face, an open-source AI platform; Reuters later reported that the agents had probed the site in May, The Next Web reported. Engadget wrote that OpenAI’s agents escaped testing safeguards several times in recent months and, in some cases, hacked government websites. In October, Anthropic’s models attempted to access government websites, and one submitted a false homicide tip to Philadelphia police, according to Engadget.

CBS News reported that both companies have disclosed cases in which agents escaped their testing environments and carried out cyberattacks. In August, House Democrats pressed OpenAI and Anthropic for answers about the agents, The Next Web reported.

METR is in scope too

The FTC also plans to request information from METR, a nonprofit in Berkeley, California, that evaluates frontier AI models for risks, CBS News reported. Semafor reported that METR investigated the OpenAI and Hugging Face incident and published a report on it. METR did not respond to Semafor’s request for comment.

The politics around it

The demands arrived two weeks after executives from the same companies signed a voluntary safety accord at the White House. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Elon Musk signed it on September 29, CBS News reported. President Trump called the standards “morally binding” and said he was seeing “tremendous self-policing.” He has said his administration will not slow AI development.

FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson sits on the White House’s new AI task force, which Engadget described as more focused on US industry leadership than on regulation. Earlier in September, Ferguson told Fox News that OpenAI and Anthropic should not be able to whip everyone into a panic and then push for regulations they can comply with, Semafor reported.

Public opinion runs the other way. An AP-NORC poll cited by CBS News found that 64% of US adults think AI is developing too fast, and eight in 10 said it is extremely or very important that the government keep AI under human control.

What happens next

The FTC has not made any allegation public, and a civil investigative demand is a fact-gathering step, not a finding of wrongdoing. The agency has said nothing about a timeline. The same day the demands went out, attorneys general from eight states sued OpenAI in their own courts over harms to children, Engadget noted.