FTC opens investigation into OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI companies over product risks

My prediction: nothing comes of this. These investigations get concluded favorably or dropped no less than six months after the midterms. There's only one voice that matters in this administration and he's already made clear he doesn't consider AI an issue and will trample his own agencies to enforce that.

You aren't thinking like a fascist. This gets used as leverage in exchange for midterm or 2028 election help.

Under that framework I could see Anthropic being blocked from IPO-ing. Amodei was slightly more confrontational than the others by sticking to their ethics, which is a really low bar. Trump does everything by vibes, so I wouldn't rule out something dramatic like pushing Amodei out for someone more controllable. Pure speculation, nobody can predict it.

That's putting it very mildly. He's made it clear he doesn't consider AI an issue at all, and there's a thread from a while back collecting the evidence.

They should be investigating them for selling massively below cost price. How is that a fair, level playing field? Making a pile of money while putting millions out of work warrants an investigation.

Do you have any evidence for that assertion? What is 'cost price' here and what exactly is being sold below it?

They just need the right lobbyists and a White House meeting, agree on terms, call it a settlement. If the FTC chair isn't agreeable, the lobbyists threaten them and they get fired. Sounds far-fetched but that's exactly what happened to Gail Slater, then head of DOJ antitrust, and her deputies in 2025 over HPE's bid for Juniper. There's a WSJ archive link.

Things are more corrupt in the US now than in Trump 1.0. I predict they force an 'ombudsman' into the data cleaning and training team so propaganda can be injected and science filtered out, like what happened to US news outlets. Plus each of them somehow puts over $1B into his personal checking account and hopes pardons cover it.

Conversely you could say Congress delegated judicial and legislative power to the executive, whose will is embodied in a democratically elected president. Gail Slater wasn't elected to anything, she exists as a function of the executive. If the antitrust chief departs from the president's will, firing them is the point of electing a president. If you disagree with the antitrust decision, the problem is the election, not the mechanism.

Trump's America's AI Action Plan already says: 'Review all Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigations commenced under the previous administration to ensure that they do not advance theories of liability that unduly burden AI innovation.' It's right there in the July whitehouse.gov PDF.

If the FTC weren't investigating three of the largest and fastest growing companies in the country for one thing or another, that would be the surprising part.

I did a 6(b) response once. The slow part wasn't the documents, it was agreeing internally on what counted as a 'safety incident.'