It’s been an alarming couple of months of rogue AI agent revelations.
Both Anthropic and OpenAI admitted that their respective AI models infiltrated third party targets without their human creators ever realizing, raising concerns over the tech industry’s ability to assert control over the systems they’re developing.
Now, as a broad range of AI executives have subsequently agreed to slow things down — allegedly efforts to ensure the safe development of powerful AI models — the US government is taking a hard look for itself. As a senior Federal Trade Commission official told the New York Post, chairman Andrew Ferguson “initiated an investigation into the leading AI firms a few weeks ago.”
An initial investigation was launched even before OpenAI’s AI models hacked the systems of open source AI platform Hugging Face. However, now the FTC is actively “drafting civil investigative demands to force testimony from the leading firms’ executives,” the Post notes.
The investigation is weighing allegations of actions that may have violated the FTC Act, a federal law designed to stop unfair business methods and protect people from deceptive trade practices.
While the official told the Post that the US needs to “win” the “AI race,” they emphasized that there are laws that “have to be followed.”
“People talk about how we need new laws for these companies, and the chairman’s been very clear,” the source added. “We have plenty of laws in the books.”
Meanwhile, president Donald Trump met with top AI CEOs on Tuesday to have them officially pledge to self-regulate their AI models — clearly signaling against any decisive government intervention in favor of leaving it up to the companies to set their own rules.
In other words, despite the FTC’s ongoing investigation, it’s unclear whether OpenAI will ever face any serious consequences for having infiltrated third parties and revealing non-public data.
It’s also possible that AI companies could be opening themselves up to major civil liability lawsuits when their AI agents hack third parties.
Case in point, the news comes just a day after a California nonprofit sued OpenAI over its hack of Hugging Face, alleging that the company’s “actions straightforwardly violated California law.”
“After the Hugging Face incident was disclosed, we actually did a bunch of work trying to educate regulators and civil society organizations about the hack,” Legal Advocates for Safe Science and Technology founder Tyler Whitmer told Wired. “And we were kind of wondering, is anyone going to do anything about this in court?”
“We think it’s extremely important that existing laws are enforced to hold AI companies accountable for the harm they’re causing,” he added. “Especially when that harm is caused by autonomous agents, because we see that as an obvious, extremely risky thing in the world that’s very new.”
To Whitmer, the Hugging Face hack is only the tip of the iceberg.
“As these systems scale and as things get crazier, AI really could be catastrophically harmful,” he told Wired.
More on rogue AIs: It’s Starting to Look Like Frontier AI Labs Will Be Taken Down in a Storm of Product Liability Suits If Their Models Keep Going on Incredibly Illegal Rogue Hacking Sprees
The post The FTC Is Now Investigating Frontier AI Labs Following Countless Hacks by Out-of-Control Agents appeared first on Futurism.
