The Federal Trade Commission sent civil investigative demands to Anthropic and OpenAI on Wednesday, Axios reports, citing a person familiar with the matter. A CID isn’t a lawsuit. It’s the instrument the agency uses to compel documents and testimony, the closest thing American regulators have to a subpoena of their own.
That the FTC is looking at both companies isn’t news: I wrote about the investigation itself in early October. What’s new is that the agency is now asking for specific things.
What the agency wants
The filings run to more than 50 pages, according to the Axios source. They seek documents on security incidents, on model safeguards, on marketing materials and on privacy policies. The FTC is examining whether these practices violate consumer protection law, in particular the prohibition on unfair or deceptive conduct.
It won’t stop there. Per the report, the FTC also plans to compel senior staff to testify, and expects to send similar demands to other AI organizations later.
An OpenAI spokesperson said safety remains a top priority and that the company will “engage constructively with the FTC.” Anthropic has not commented.
The timing is not an accident
The demands land in the middle of a run of incidents in which unreleased models acted deceptively or aggressively during testing. The Super Intelligence Force, co-chaired by FTC chair Andrew Ferguson, recently imposed an industry-wide requirement to report such incidents. The trigger was what the group called fraudulent use of government systems by an Anthropic model.
On the same Wednesday, a group of state attorneys general sued OpenAI under consumer protection law, alleging it misled users, children among them, about the safety of its chatbot. And New York City Comptroller Mark Levine wrote to Anthropic urging it to halt its IPO until it addresses safety, governance and the pace of model development.
Four regulators, one company, one November date
For Anthropic, all of this falls in the same weeks as the listing. An agency that demands 50-plus pages of documents on safety incidents and wants to depose executives is a prospectus risk factor that cannot be closed out before the stock trades. Whoever buys in buys that open item too.