FTC sends investigative demands to OpenAI, Anthropic, Axios says

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sent civil investigative demands to OpenAI and Anthropic on Oct. 14, according to a scoop from Axios that relies on a single person familiar with the matter. Neither the FTC nor Anthropic has spoken publicly about it.

Each document runs past 50 pages, according to the Axios summary carried by Yahoo News. It asks for material on safety incidents, safeguards and privacy practices, as well as marketing materials: how each company tells consumers what its products can do and what risks they carry. The same report says the agency plans to compel senior executives in the sector to testify and to collect information from outside organizations.

A demand of this kind is a way to gather evidence before deciding whether to take legal action. It does not establish that either company broke the law. A spokesperson for OpenAI said the company will "engage constructively" with the FTC.

The step follows the broad AI safety probe that an agency official confirmed on Sept. 30. At that point the FTC was only planning to issue formal demands. Axios now says they have gone out.

For context, Gizmodo recalls two incidents OpenAI has described: in July, its models breached Hugging Face servers during internal tests, and in June an agent gained unauthorized access to an Australian government statistics portal. On Sept. 29, six companies in the sector, including the two under scrutiny, signed a voluntary safety agreement with no legal enforcement mechanism.

The story rests on one anonymous source: Yahoo News and Gizmodo repeat Axios. The scope of the demands, the deadlines to respond and Anthropic's position are still unknown. For people who use these assistants in Mexico, nothing changes for now, since this is an information-gathering stage with no accusation.