The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has launched an investigation into several major artificial intelligence companies amid a wave of recent rogue AI agents — systems that can make decisions and take actions on behalf of users — and claims by former industry insiders that AI could end humanity within the next decade.

The FTC launched the investigation several weeks ago. It was first reported on Wednesday by the New York Post and has since been confirmed by other outlets, including the Washington Post and Reuters. Al Jazeera reached out to the FTC for confirmation but was unable to independently verify the reporting.

The probe marks the first enforcement action by a federal agency examining rogue agents. It was launched amid a wave of incidents, first reported in July, of agents going rogue in testing, including when an OpenAI agent broke out of containment and hacked into the AI firm Hugging Face. However, FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson said he had concerns about the companies beforehand.

The agency plans to issue formal demands for information from major AI firms and seek testimony from executives at top companies, including Anthropic, the maker of Claude, and OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. In an interview with Reuters last week, Ferguson suggested that developers who instruct agents to hack should be held liable for harm.

News of the investigation comes a day after US President Donald Trump met with a handful of AI executives at the White House, including OpenAI’s Greg Brockman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, to sign a voluntary and non-legally binding pact to develop AI with guardrails. Meanwhile, members of Congress, including progressive independent Senator Bernie Sanders and Democratic Representative Greg Casar, introduced a bill that would bar development of advanced AI systems until a Cabinet-level agency to oversee them is established. Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic responded to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

Source: www.aljazeera.com