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FTC is investigating OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI companies over product risks

208 points · 159 comments · dgellow

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jfasi · 1790860571 · focus · HN ↗
My prediction: nothing will come of this, and these investigations will either be concluded favorably or dropped no less than six months after the midterms.
There's only one voice that matters in this administration, and he has already made it quite clear that he both does not consider AI to be an issue, and he is more than happy to trample over his agencies to enforce his opinion.
1. 2OEH8eoCRo0 · 1790860792 · focus · HN ↗
  You aren't thinking like a fascist. This will be used as leverage in exchange for midterm or 2028 election help.
2. dgellow · 1790861304 · focus · HN ↗
  Under that framework I could see Anthropic being blocked from IPO-ing. Amodei was just slightly more confrontational than the other players by wanting to stick to their ethics (which is a really low bar). Given Trump is the pettiest person ever and does everything by vibes, I wouldn’t exclude something dramatic, like pushing Amodei out and replacing him with someone he can control better.
  Just speculating here
  1. strange_quark · 1790864569 · focus · HN ↗
    Too conspiratorial to think that they (the AI companies) want to be blocked or at least temporarily delayed from IPO? Finances are too bad to do it but delaying for ambiguous reasons will sink their valuations. Trump can’t let the stock market collapse before the midterms. Hence this whole big safety dog and pony show. Keep the market up until the midterms, then hand off the bag.
    dgellow · 1790868439 · focus · HN ↗
    Hmm, my instinct is to say that’s too far fetched, but given how corrupt that whole thing is I really don’t know. I would add that to the list of possibilities and reevaluate how plausible that is once we see Anthropic’s 2026 numbers.
    Though it’s pretty depressing that we can’t just dismiss it directly…
    brokenmachine · 1790900666 · focus · HN ↗
    Also, if the govt steps in, the AI companies can declare force majeure so they can kick the can down the road a bit longer.
    Oracle is the canary.
3. customguy · 1790862520 · focus · HN ↗
  > he has already made it quite clear that he both does not consider AI to be an issue
  which is putting it very mildly: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49824686">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49824686
4. pessimizer · 1790866404 · focus · HN ↗
  The problem is that there's absolutely no doubt in my mind that Democrats would be doing the exact same thing if they were in power.
  They will also put up only PR-oriented #resistance, aiming all attacks at Trump (as you have) and ignoring the AI companies themselves.
  They'll save their criticism for loudmouth AI CEOs that agree to jump out and catch a few bullets (that will bounce off harmlessly, it doesn't matter what the public thinks about them) aimed at Democratic politicians who just voted for something they said that they were against because the Republicans didn't have enough for a majority.
  Loudmouth CEO: "Actually people should be grateful that they're losing their jobs - if they actually loved their jobs, and loved the world, they'd be happy that it was being done better than they ever could, because AI is perfect and guided by us wise, wonderful people."
  Democratic Congressman who just voted to take away a state's ability to stop a data center being built in the middle of a reservoir: "Do you have no shame sir! You give a bad name to the majority of CEOs who are beautiful people who defend us from the inscrutable Chinese hordes. It's thoughtless talk like this that is leading to the rise in subversion among the paranoid terrorists that are emboldening the bullies who show up to city council meetings and anti-data center protests! I'm going to demand that we not award you the 634th no-bid contract that you asked for, and when we are forced to admit that we can't actually cancel that award, I'll ask that you be officially censured by Congress!"
  1. sdenton4 · 1790869604 · focus · HN ↗
    Even worse than whataboutism is hypothetical whataboutism....
    AI is shaping up to be a major concern amongst the non-tech segment of the population. Some of the arguments are good, some are dumb, but people largely are forming up against AI and datacenters. Yes, you should expect politicians to act on that; it's how the system is meant to work.
    FLeXMurphy · 1790876321 · focus · HN ↗
    Source on the "largely".
    neuronexmachina · 1790877006 · focus · HN ↗
    <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/09/22/americans-views-of-data-centers-have-turned-more-negative/" rel="nofollow">https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/09/22/americans...
    s1artibartfast · 1790886770 · focus · HN ↗
    California assembly passed a bill on ai safety and Gavin Newsom vetoed it. Thats not hypothetical
  2. jhonof · 1790872354 · focus · HN ↗
    Silicon Valley was freaking out last democrat admin because anti trust laws were actually being enforced finally by Lina Khan, I actually completely disagree and I think this admin has been very obviously worse.
  3. goatlover · 1790881271 · focus · HN ↗
    So why did the tech CEOs and VCs get behind Trump's reelection if there's no meaningful difference? We can see it already, Trump is saying they should regulate themselves.
5. thelastgallon · 1790876025 · focus · HN ↗
  You're right. Nothing will come out of this. It is very important for these companies that they are sued now by the super-friendly administration and be gently punished (Punishment: Don't do it again, Ok? Defendents: We promise we won't do it again) or settled for a measly sum of a few million (no admission of guilt).
  Then you can be never tried again for the same crimes. There is some law against being tried for the same crimes multiple times.
  1. unrented7977 · 1790877376 · focus · HN ↗
    That's not how that works. If you kill someone and are tried for it, guilty or not, that does not give you license to go kill more people. You can be tried for the same crime if you do the crime again.
    You cannot be tried multiple times for the same instance of a crime.
    Since OAI et al don't appear interested in stopping crime, they can (and likely will) be tried again the next time they do it.
    dasil003 · 1790878588 · focus · HN ↗
    Technically from a legal perspective sure, but there is also the common cultural understanding of these things, and an overton window of how we talk about them. The whole doomer narrative, and pseudo-anthromorphization (xenomorphization?) where we ascribe agency and volition to the algorithm, plays right to the interests of the AI leaders by simultaneously making their products so incredibly powerful and civilization altering that of course the valuations are justified, while also providing a convenient narrative that if anything goes wrong the AI did it and there was no way for them to control this new life form. Privatize the benefit, socialize the risk; this is not a new playbook.
    bluefirebrand · 1790887871 · focus · HN ↗
    > You can be tried for the same crime if you do the crime again.
    > Since OAI et al don't appear interested in stopping crime, they can (and likely will) be tried again the next time they do it.
    There is no second entire internet for them to steal though
    conception · 1790909700 · focus · HN ↗
    Their bot crawling numbers seem to disagree.
6. thatsabadlook · 1790876314 · focus · HN ↗
  Ffs one of the CEOs of one of the companies is about to be in charge of a us military task force lol. The ftc investigating military leadership over safety concerns... Bet... Definitely going to yield results that benefit the public. Lol.
  1. Arodex · 1790879408 · focus · HN ↗
    And that one is already a clear security concern for years, getting direct calls from Putin:
    <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/06/12/elon-musk-trump-putin-security-risk-starlink-spacex-dhs-justice-department/" rel="nofollow">https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/06/12/elon-musk-trump-putin-s...
    <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/29/opinion/elon-musk-china-classified-secrets-national-security-russia-doge.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/29/opinion/elon-musk-china-c...
7. cmoski · 1790882169 · focus · HN ↗
  He very much considers AI to be an issue. Because he wants you to call it SI.
  1. anon48293 · 1790920204 · focus · HN ↗
    Senile intelligence?
8. dev_daftly · 1790882764 · focus · HN ↗
  This is an ignorant take. Everybody involved in the administration has pretty much been on the same page that the new regulations openai/anthropic want aren't necessary because they are already liable for what their ai does.
  <a href="https://fortune.com/2026/09/22/bessent-ai-labs-responsibility-government-liability-shield/" rel="nofollow">https://fortune.com/2026/09/22/bessent-ai-labs-responsibilit...
  1. datsci_est_2015 · 1790888472 · focus · HN ↗
    Scott Bessent has had several foot-in-mouth gaffes through his tenure, I would not put much weight on his words in this case, especially if they contradict his handler.
9. fragmede · 1790883596 · focus · HN ↗
  You mean SI, don't you?
10. cyanydeez · 1790904723 · focus · HN ↗
  Not nothing grift and probably An endorsement for the largest grift.
amelius · 1790860691 · focus · HN ↗
They should be investigating them because of massively selling below cost price.
How is this a fair, level, playing field, U.S.? Making a large pile of money to put millions of people out of a job, it warrants some investigations!
1. gtCameron · 1790860810 · focus · HN ↗
  Do you have any evidence of this assertion? What is 'cost price' and what is being sold below that?
  1. hedora · 1790861450 · focus · HN ↗
    Claude says my token spend is $15k per week. I’m being charged $50.
    They can only do that because of circular finance deals and other fraud. Those deals are also the reason a machine that’d run ~ Claude Opus 4.6 locally costs $5000 instead of the original $1400 MSRP.
    NathanaelRea · 1790863005 · focus · HN ↗
    Their margins are 90-95%. If I have a gym that charges $50 for an hour pass, but $100 for a month "subscription", would you feel the same way, that you got $36k of value?
    dgellow · 1790863318 · focus · HN ↗
    That percentage is speculative for now, we don’t actually know their margin. What we know is that Anthropic said publicly they have 80% gross margin IFF they use their own adjusted EBIDTA metric, which ignores revenue sharing, training costs, and stock based compensation
    lelanthran · 1790883335 · focus · HN ↗
    > Their margins are 90-95%.
    Where did you read that? Linky?
    arctic-true · 1790864731 · focus · HN ↗
    For antitrust purposes below-cost pricing is not expressly illegal. It is only illegal if there is a “dangerous probability” that the firm in question will be able to recoup its losses after eliminating its competitors by taking away all their demand and then jacking up prices when they’re the only game in town. In the case of your Claude tokens, even if they’re being sold below cost, they’re being sold for more than anyone else is selling tokens. So it’s hard to argue that they’re going to drive everyone else out of the market with their pricing.
    amelius · 1790864958 · focus · HN ↗
    > So it’s hard to argue that they’re going to drive everyone else out of the market with their pricing.
    Eh, their AI is going to put millions of people out of a job ...
    AnimalMuppet · 1790866912 · focus · HN ↗
    For the antitrust argument, that is irrelevant.
    amelius · 1790867157 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't think so.
    Gormo · 1790870306 · focus · HN ↗
    I think the previous commenter is referring to the actual legally applicable definition, not his own definition or yours.
    amelius · 1790872380 · focus · HN ↗
    The law doesn't matter, it was not made for this. Let a judge make their own interpretation. If you talk about level playing fields, then you should act like it. Not allow VCs to make piles of money to put everybody else out of business.
    If this is not unfair competition, then what is?
    AnimalMuppet · 1790873419 · focus · HN ↗
    Judges are supposed to make their interpretation on the law. The law wasn't made for this? Then you better pass something that is. The alternative is to abandon the rule of law. "Just once, just for this urgent problem" rarely remains confined just to this problem. Keep the rule of law; pass a new one if you need to.
    amelius · 1790873965 · focus · HN ↗
    The problem with this approach is that the law will always be lagging behind. It is not fair to change the rules during the game.
    Gormo · 1790880896 · focus · HN ↗
    > The problem with this approach is that the law will always be lagging behind. It is not fair to change the rules during the game.
    Why is that a problem? Why would we want prescriptive rules to be formulated in advance of the reality to which they're meant to apply being fully understood?
    > Therefore, the only solution is to ensure people act according to the spirit of the law, not the actual law.
    Which is something our actual legal system already does fairly well, precisly because it doesn't overemphasise technical, instrumental details, and applies broad rules to intentional conduct in an often form-agnostic way. For example, anti-trust laws about collusion and price fixing wouldn't care about what specific communications medium was used to coordinate collusion, apart from validating the evidence that there was indeed collusion.
    In this case, I think the mistake you're making is in thinking that restrictions on the introduction of new technologies based on the long-term effect they might have on demand for particular services in the overall economy is something that is within the spirit of the existing law. It isn't. It never has been.
    People have certainly worried about how new technologies would impact people's earning power over time, dating back centuries to at least the era of steam engines and railroads, but that's never translated into any legal framework allowing for restraining the development of new technologies. Anti-trust law has nothing to do with it, and the spirit of the law behind it has always been aimed at protecting consumers against market manipulation, not protecting employees against reduced demand for their services.
    lesuorac · 1790873584 · focus · HN ↗
    Putting people out of Jobs isn't directly an anti-trust concern.
    The concern is predatory pricing [1]. Which may or may not result in job loss (the surviving company could hire/acquire the dieing companies).
    [1]: <a href="https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/guide-antitrust-laws/single-firm-conduct/predatory-or-below-cost-pricing" rel="nofollow">https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
    Gormo · 1790876962 · focus · HN ↗
    > The law doesn't matter, it was not made for this.
    Not sure I'm following. This appears to be a conversation about how the law applies to the situation.
    > If this is not unfair competition, then what is?
    Again, "unfair competition" has a specific legal definition. If you don't care about the specifics of the law, and are just expressing your own normative opinions about how you'd prefer for certain things to play out, what is the purpose of attempting to express those opinions using specific, already existing legal terminology?
    TheCoelacanth · 1790883684 · focus · HN ↗
    Judges making their own interpretation is the entire problem with anti-trust law.
    The law is very explicit: no mergers or acquisitions where the "effect may be substantially to lessen competition". Not "will" lessen competition, "may" lessen competition.
    The law as written should prevent basically any merger between large competitors. Judges have watered that down with bullshit about customer harm that appears nowhere in the law.
    lelanthran · 1790883261 · focus · HN ↗
    > It is only illegal if there is a “dangerous probability” that the firm in question will be able to recoup its losses after eliminating its competitors by taking away all their demand and then jacking up prices when they’re the only game in town.
    Aren't the competitors in this instance the workers?
    deepwoods · 1790914838 · focus · HN ↗
    Not really, no. Anthropic sells tokens, not services. It's up to the user to turn those tokens into something useful.
    There are also non-price reasons to switch from human labor to agentic labor. No sick days, no recruiting costs, no moral foibles, etc. It's like arguing that Ford competes with Uber - both are ultimately selling you a way to get from A to B, but they are doing it in radically different ways.
    lelanthran · 1790946209 · focus · HN ↗
    >> Aren't the competitors in this instance the workers?
    > Not really, no. Anthropic sells tokens, not services. It's up to the user to turn those tokens into something useful.
    > There are also non-price reasons to switch from human labor to agentic labor. No sick days, no recruiting costs, no moral foibles, etc.
    I have to know, how can you call them "agentic labour" and still claim that it is not competing with human labour?
    ChrisRR · 1790866357 · focus · HN ↗
    Frying pan infomercials say I'm getting a £200 value for only £29.99. I'd take their claims with a pinch of salt
    user43928 · 1790866537 · focus · HN ↗
    For $15k you can rent like 14x B200 on-demand at retail prices and run them continuously for a week.
    According to this analysis, at 70 tokens per second for Kimi K3, you could expect to run >800 parallel streams on that setup:
    <a href="https://inferencex.semianalysis.com/run/kimi-k3-on-b200" rel="nofollow">https://inferencex.semianalysis.com/run/kimi-k3-on-b200
2. micromacrofoot · 1790871147 · focus · HN ↗
  This is how tons of startups operate, I used to be able to get across the whole city in an Uber for $5, easily quarter of the cost at the time. They undercut taxis until they barely existed then jacked up the prices.
  VC creates little wars of attrition in every industry and calls it "disruption" but it mostly pulls the money out of workers' pockets.
Cipater · 1790861369 · focus · HN ↗
They just need to hire the right lobbyists, get a meeting at the White House, agree on the terms and call it a settlement.
And if the FTC chair is not agreeable, they will be threatened by said lobbyists and eventually be fired.
If this sounds far-fetched, it is exactly what happened to Gail Slater, then-head of the DOJ's antitrust division and her deputies in 2025 over HPE’s bid to acquire Juniper.
Wall Street Journal archive link: <a href="https://archive.ph/IMer9" rel="nofollow">https://archive.ph/IMer9
1. hedora · 1790861813 · focus · HN ↗
  Things are more corrupt in the US now. That would have worked in Trump 1.0.
  I predict they’ll be forced to install an “ombudsman” in the data cleaning / training team, so Trump can inject propaganda and filter out science. (As has been done to many US news outlets already).
  Also, they will somehow each put >> $1B into his personal checking account, and hope presidential pardons cover bribing the president after the next few elections.
  1. theoreticalmal · 1790866862 · focus · HN ↗
    I assume you’ll keep the same disdain when the ombudsman is replaced by the democrats in two years and continues the same work with new talking points?
    actionfromafar · 1790867401 · focus · HN ↗
    Do you want this? Almost a USSR style system?
    jmye · 1790873263 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    akk0 · 1790879773 · focus · HN ↗
    What is your point? Prospective whataboutism?
2. mjburgess · 1790861819 · focus · HN ↗
  Conversely, you could say that congress has delegated "judicial and legislative" powers to the executive, whose will is embodied in a democratically elected president.
  "Gail Slater" is not a democratically elected person of any kind, and exists as a function of the executive, and hence of the president's policies. Insofar as the DOJ's anti-trust's leaders depart from the will of the elected president, it is that leader to be fired and replaced. Or else: what ever was the point of electing a president?
  There's nothing in principle wrong in a president disagreeing with the execution of his executive powers, delegated to Gail, and hence firing him. Indeed, if that were not the case, the election of a president could never change the operation of the executive, making the election pointless.
  If you disagree with the anti-trust decision, the issue isn't with the political mechanism by which it was over-ruled, but with the election of that president.
  1. mjburgess · 1790888092 · focus · HN ↗
    EDIT: To the down-voters who lack imagination.
    Suppose a president was elected that you voted for, that you agreed with was blocked by one of his employees... are you really trusting the hiring process of one of his predecessors?
    No, obviously.
    pixelatedindex · 1790897260 · focus · HN ↗
    We are ruling by imagination now?
    > you could say that congress has delegated "judicial and legislative" powers to the executive, whose will is embodied in a democratically elected president.
    Bullshit. No, you cannot say that. “The non-delegation doctrine is a constitutional principle that Congress cannot delegate its legislative powers to another branch of government or to private entities.”
    mjburgess · 1790919467 · focus · HN ↗
    Ah, well if you take the view that congress cannot delegate these powers, then there can be no executive anti-trust office, so this whole thing is moot.
    However, this isn't the mainstream view -- but a radical departure of several hundred years of mixed-power agencies. See, eg., archetypally, The Fed. A wide variety of federal agencies are mixed powers, esp. regulation of businesses by the executive which is a legislative (administrators make rules) and judicial power (administrators decide if they apply). This is uncontroversial, I know of no view on this which denies this claim.
    There is nothing in my comment which can be "a lie", because its offering a theory of government which the original commenter lacked. Its not clear what theory of government is supposed to enable an executive anti-trust office with the power to intervene without a court, that isnt subject to presidential oversight.
    People down-voting because they disagree with the theory of government offered is just as confused. The point of HN is to reply to something you disagree with, if offered in good faith, not to down-vote it.
    [deleted] · 1790927793 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
  2. [deleted] · 1790897151 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
3. totetsu · 1790863000 · focus · HN ↗
  Trump's America’s AI Action Plan[1] 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.”
  [1] <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Americas-AI-Action-Plan.pdf?chain_id=koD7XgKiD556Bq.1kvnr2e&global_content=%7B%22promote_id%22%3A13766%2C%22sub_promote_id%22%3A14%2C%22f%22%3A%22www.futunn.com%2Flearn%2Fdetail-trump-released-the-u-s-ai-action-plan-these-four-major-investment-themes-are-essential-to-know-91481-250791041%22%7D" rel="nofollow">https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Americ...
  1. lubujackson · 1790864690 · focus · HN ↗
    Big Beautiful Bribe
  2. eth0up · 1790868999 · focus · HN ↗
    Marked your comment as a favorite. May even frame it. And display it this Halloween. Haunting.
4. AndrewKemendo · 1790865910 · focus · HN ↗
  This is just how business is done with the government nothing new here or even hidden really.
  Should this be the way it happens? No
  Is it? Yes
  The main thing I’ve seen recently is people learning how the world works then being shocked when it’s nothing like what is sold publicly
  1. CookieCrisp · 1790867054 · focus · HN ↗
    I was incredibly more naive and idealistic 2 years ago. Seeing the world more accurately than I did before has been quite the shock
    AndrewKemendo · 1790867789 · focus · HN ↗
    That’s awesome!
    I am legit curious though: what changed specifically in your information gathering process that revealed these things?
    For example pretty much everything happening now has been well described by Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn specifically about American politics since the 1960s. I mean similarly for the entire black community and don’t forget Martin Luther King was killed because he was trying to organize sanitation workers.
    Chris Hedges has been reporting about the state of things daily for two decades now. Similarly for Jacobin magazine.
    Ron Paul (whatever you think of him) was talking explicitly about this corruption in the context of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and the bail out of the banking market in 2008.
    Ross Perot famously described how Nafta was a big sellout to the multinational corporations and would devastate US industry - on stage at the 1992(?) presidential debate and everybody just made fun of him because he was short and had slightly larger ears because he was an older guy.
    altmanaltman · 1790869263 · focus · HN ↗
    The US president sells early access to his official tweets at $100k per month. Things have definitely gotten worse even if they were shit to begin with.
    forshaper · 1790884073 · focus · HN ↗
    Well a lot of this is simply published. Like, from reading a bill, agency rules, memos, whatever. Most of it is not hidden, except by...boredom? Like you had to be interested for whatever reason to go looking for it. Or embedded somehow in one of the institutions where you can see what the people at the bottom of the institution can see, without wanting to make a career out of it. Since if you decide that, then there's no incentive to notice.
    CookieCrisp · 1791043065 · focus · HN ↗
    I spent three months in another country where I didn’t apeak the language very well. Hard not to see life’s brutal realities from that position
  2. lovich · 1790868786 · focus · HN ↗
    There’s no denying that this administration has taken corruption to a new level
    AndrewKemendo · 1790869552 · focus · HN ↗
    You might want to look into teapot dome
    SmasherEpilepti · 1790870553 · focus · HN ↗
    The teapot dome wasn't the president making policy decisions specifically to enrich himself. The man involved conducted his illicit affairs in secret, and went to prison for it.
    The blatant nature of it now and complete complicity of large swaths of the government in the corruption are a level that has never been seen before. The Teapot Dome scandal involved the equivalent of tens of millions of present day dollars. The actions of the president alone now are what would have been considered dozens of individual career-ending scandals only a couple generations ago.
    scottyah · 1790874743 · focus · HN ↗
    At the state/city level, California and Los Angeles have much more blatant corruption. From the High Speed Rail to LA's billions of homeless money (now some invoices showing house purchases, ubers to and payments at strip clubs). I think more politicians are just shameless about it lately. Karen Bass was reelected anyway, and Gavin is gaining support in a run for presidency even. Buying votes has never been easier.
    lovich · 1790879846 · focus · HN ↗
    I don’t think there’s anything done in those states as Trump coin. Or the Qatari plane he already said is being moved to his foundation after his term.
    You’re pointing at failed projects that may or may not have corruption(I’d like to see the receipts and from a mouth other than nick shirley) compared to explicit, I’m taking this money.
    Or the IRS deal, or 1000 other in the air open corruption
    scottyah · 1790883557 · focus · HN ↗
    <a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-defendants-employed-la-area-homeless-nonprofits-arrested-federal-charges-alleging-misuse" rel="nofollow">https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-defendants-employed-la-ar...
    <a href="https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-09-16/la-homeless-services-federal-charges" rel="nofollow">https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-09-16/la-homel...
    <a href="https://calmatters.org/housing/homelessness/2026/09/la-homeless-services-federal-charges/" rel="nofollow">https://calmatters.org/housing/homelessness/2026/09/la-homel...
    It's so crazy how politicized fraud has gotten. Diehard Dems offhandedly dismiss Nick Shirley and DOGE even though all they look for is proof of fraud. If someone is doing that for free, why on earth would you want to stop or dismiss it before any evidence or reporting has been delivered? There's no shortage of it from either side, why defend the scummy parts of your party vs trying to root it out?
    lovich · 1790889259 · focus · HN ↗
    Yea none of this is as blatant as the public corruption Trump has done.
    You understand what I mean by blatant right? Like this shit you linked didn’t have advertisements.
    I dismiss Nick Shirley because he crows about corruption that was already being prosecuted as somehow being novel and the few bits I’ve listened to from him honestly made me think he might be a bit slow.
    I dismiss DOGE because it accomplished next to nothing, if anything, lied about its accomplishments, and helped Musk get rid of shit that was against his private goals. DOGE was also corruption. Saying all they did was “… look for is proof of fraud” is factually incorrect.
    SmasherEpilepti · 1790895575 · focus · HN ↗
    "for free" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. By all reasonable measures, DOGE has cost far more than it has saved, and the vast majority of its recommended cuts were entirely political.
    lovich · 1790879205 · focus · HN ↗
    Don’t need to. Already knew of it. You may want to look into it if you think it’s comparable to this admin.
    pixelatedindex · 1790896766 · focus · HN ↗
    Teapot Dome had an investigative Congress who actually did their job. Plus Fall went to prison. Neither of this is going to happen today.
  3. e3dd · 1790879365 · focus · HN ↗
    Erm this is reality period forget about the govt.
    Do you do things without expecting something of benefit in return e.g. work?
    Humans are conditioned to be like this. Govt indeed cares what you can do to extend its power and reach.
    Not rocket science.
    Thats why Ive never understood people who resist - you will be far better off in assisting and getting ahead of it to try and shape it. Then you MAY have a chance. Resisting it? Youre just delaying the inevitable I'm afraid.
    AndrewKemendo · 1790881409 · focus · HN ↗
    Don’t forget the part where massive swaths of people who won’t risk anything at all, sneer at those that lost it all, because they aren’t perfectly aligned on some pet topic.
    e3dd · 1790892888 · focus · HN ↗
    I agree. Yes.
    Btw I've already accepted my role as an assister. Haters come at me. See you on the other side!
    I've long accepted that people by-on-large cannot be helped, western society has knowledge and understanding in abundance and yet... they lack self-control and self-respect. They need someone to instill it in them.
    Peter Thiel's recent remarks on being evil is better than being bad captures this reality of life quite well.
5. GrinningFool · 1790866500 · focus · HN ↗
  Perhaps once they all agree to calling it "superintelligence", these troubles will go away.
  1. Zambyte · 1790866763 · focus · HN ↗
    <a href="https://america.gov" rel="nofollow">https://america.gov isn't even calling artificial intelligence "super intelligence". Trump just says words. People should stop trying to find meaning in them.
    matthewdgreen · 1790867118 · focus · HN ↗
    My colleagues at NIST just got a memo directing them to refer to AI as “SI” so it does seem to be filtering down to the agencies. This is a problem because “SI” is also a classification marking.
    lovich · 1790868735 · focus · HN ↗
    Can’t make money off of Slovenian domains without the rebrand. That’s obviously going to take precedence for the king.
    triceratops · 1790870290 · focus · HN ↗
    > This is a problem because “SI” is also a classification marking
    Good thing the US uses the imperial system one less source of confusion /s
    rootusrootus · 1790874007 · focus · HN ↗
    I know you said /s but I'm feeling all serious or something this morning, so ...
    - The US government's official policy is metric (and has been for something like 50 years now).
    - The population uses a mix of metric and US customary units, not imperial.
    UK is kinda similar, I suppose, but their typical usage of metric/imperial tilts more heavily in favor of metric. I wonder how many other countries are also still doing mixed measurement systems at this point?
    CodeWriter23 · 1790881506 · focus · HN ↗
    They can just make up another name to redefine that which people are already used to. Just like they did to kilobyte.
    CodeWriter23 · 1790881733 · focus · HN ↗
    > This is a problem because “SI” is also a classification marking.
    They can just make up another name to redefine this classification which people are already used to. How about SIBISI? This follows the transformation they instituted a'la kilobyte -> kibibyte.
    malfist · 1790869905 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah, why should anybody care what the president of the united states says. It's just words. You shouldn't find meaning in them
    WolfeReader · 1790876504 · focus · HN ↗
    I get the sarcastic intent in your comment; but it's more useful to focus on what Trump does than the things he says.
    One of his strategies is to say unbelievable things like he's gonna revoke Rosie O'Donnell's citizenship or something weird like "superior intelligence", and the news will cover that instead of whichever agencies he's getting or how much he appears in the Epstein files.
    mattm · 1790870207 · focus · HN ↗
    There was actually an Executive Order on this two days ago: <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/09/inaugurating-the-era-of-super-intelligence/" rel="nofollow">https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/09/inau...
    > It is therefore the policy of my Administration that, to the maximum extent permitted by law, the executive branch shall use the terms “Super Intelligence” and “SI” in place of “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI” and will not acknowledge the usage of “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI” in any applicable setting.
    empyrrhicist · 1790872074 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm tired, boss.
    lossyalgo · 1790875145 · focus · HN ↗
    That's literally part of the plan of Project 2025 which is well underway: <a href="https://www.project2025.observer/en" rel="nofollow">https://www.project2025.observer/en
    Cider9986 · 1790874163 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    Hamuko · 1790877230 · focus · HN ↗
    He wants to play king.
    squidsoup · 1790878809 · focus · HN ↗
    .si domain grift, probably.
    freejazz · 1790880298 · focus · HN ↗
    > reasoning
    Oh boy, you're in for a doozy.
    dofm · 1790873870 · focus · HN ↗
    "People" don't have that luxury. Especially internationally.
    From an international perspective, America is Trump, in a way that is far more acute than even when it was Obama or GWB. Back then you could understand POTUS as sitting on top of an enormous apparatus that didn't just act out his whims; in the current situation we have to treat him as a sort of dimwit emperor.
    rootusrootus · 1790875923 · focus · HN ↗
    I think you can say the same about how it is viewed domestically, as well.
    Perhaps the right wing always thought that the government was the personal weapon of the sitting president, and that is why they are so comfortable with actually making it so, but the left wing has predominantly seen it as an enormous bureaucracy governed by policy and laws that only changed relatively slowly, and not at the whim of an individual.
    Now when I see data and the source is the federal government, my reaction is "this is probably fake, or at least biased heavily." Makes me a little sad to have that reaction, e.g. I used to like going to the NIH web site to find information, but now I assume it has been curated to meet an ideological narrative.
    I also do not have a lot of confidence that this situation will be a one-off aberration and the democrats will bring sanity back and implement better safeguards against the next demagogue. On the contrary, I think it is very plausible they will see this as an opportunity they had not dreamed of before.
    preg_match · 1790901458 · focus · HN ↗
    > Trump just says words. People should stop trying to find meaning in them.
    I mean he's the actual president, and his words make policy. They aren't words, they're actions, threats, promises.
    That means if the words are stupid, like you say, it doesn't stop there. It leads to stupid actions that affect millions of people, as we have seen time. And time. And time again.
    Trump also just "said words" about the Tariffs. Talking out of his ass. Did that stop the economic effects? No, actually, it made them much worse and more volatile.
6. paimapi · 1790867192 · focus · HN ↗
  there's also regulatory capture where regulators get hired by these companies for six-to-seven figure jobs once they're out
  <a href="https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/us-government-regulators-may-be-favoring-their-future-private-sector-employers" rel="nofollow">https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/us-government-regulat...
  1. wins32767 · 1790870112 · focus · HN ↗
    That's not an inherently bad practice. I'd much rather there be two way flow between industry and government than have people who have never tried to run a business doing regulation or those who have never worked in government trying to comply with regulations. Strong ethics rules and culture is the way you manage the downside, not bans.
    salawat · 1790873111 · focus · HN ↗
    The hell do you work where ethics culture exists in business? I gotta be looking in the wrong places, because all I ever see is lip service granted to ethics until they threaten the bottom line, then suddenly they disappear.
    SpicyLemonZest · 1790874078 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    Avicebron · 1790874545 · focus · HN ↗
    Well you see, you just frame your ethics that anything done in service to the bottom line is inherently good. Easy as, anyone complaining about rapacious behavior or a decrease in their quality of life is the real evil (tm)
    pixelatedindex · 1790896476 · focus · HN ↗
    > you just frame your ethics that anything done in service to the bottom line is inherently good
    I thought that was the whole point of that Dodge vs Ford case which enshrined shareholder supremacy?
    paimapi · 1790875365 · focus · HN ↗
    right, it worked really well for the 737 Max: <a href="https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/how-the-revolving-door-at-faa-spins-boeings-way/" rel="nofollow">https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/how-t...
    and the 2008 financial crisis: <a href="https://www.mercatus.org/research/policy-briefs/recourse-rule-how-regulatory-capture-gave-rise-financial-crisis" rel="nofollow">https://www.mercatus.org/research/policy-briefs/recourse-rul...
    just to name two obscure examples
    wins32767 · 1790889926 · focus · HN ↗
    SOX2, a standard governed by the a CPA certification body, costs billions of dollars a year to collectively implement and doesn't meaningfully improve security. FDA auditors trying to regulate software development for clinical trial data capture makes clinical trial software cost ~30% more AND makes it lower quality. There are costs on both sides of the continuum. The costs for bad regulators are just diffuse.
    paimapi · 1790953556 · focus · HN ↗
    SOC2 is an industry self-governing standard and a really bad example? if you pass SOC2, do you pass a federal audit of HIPAA and PII compliance? there's industry self-regulation that's often pointless and a costly rubber-stamp (like SOC2) and then there's actual audits of systems with legal teeth
    if anything, your example serves to prove my point. for everything from baby formula regulatory standards to regulation of toxic pollutants into water reserves, I'd much rather a robust, regulatory standard with teeth. for things in software, we're sorely lacking that which is why we have privacy breaches and gross misuse by large corporations on the regular
    wins32767 · 1790960024 · focus · HN ↗
    I also want a robust regulatory standard with teeth. But I want it written and enforced by highly skilled people who have some actual experience with doing the thing that's regulated.
    And in many fields the pay gap between government and private industry is such that you won't get good people to work for the government if that means they can never again work for private industry.
    paimapi · 1790963151 · focus · HN ↗
    surely that can be solved by diverting money away from, say, military spending to regulatory bodies instead so these roles become both high-prestige and well-compensated (vs getting rid of regulatory bodies entire)
7. palmotea · 1790871791 · focus · HN ↗
  > They just need to hire the right lobbyists, get a meeting at the White House, agree on the terms and call it a settlement.
  I wonder if this is just self-consciously a self-dealing thing explicitly designed to block off further investigations. Clear them, then they can't be properly investigated for that activity in the future.
  1. SpicyLemonZest · 1790872957 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
8. tedd4u · 1790950137 · focus · HN ↗
  [delayed]
throwaway5752 · 1790862195 · focus · HN ↗
This FTC? <a href="https://www.commoncause.org/articles/who-is-trumps-fcc-chair-brendan-carr-5-ways-hes-undermining-free-speech/" rel="nofollow">https://www.commoncause.org/articles/who-is-trumps-fcc-chair...
asdfasgasdgasdg · 1790863169 · focus · HN ↗
If the FTC weren't investigating three of the largest and fastest growing companies in the country for one thing or another, it would be kinda surprising to me.
hncbw02z5a · 1790863316 · focus · HN ↗
Did a 6(b) response once and the slow part wasn't the documents, it was agreeing internally on what counted as a "safety incident.
pessimizer · 1790865972 · focus · HN ↗
FTC starting the process of immunizing OpenAI, Anthropic, and a few other well-connected AI companies from liabilities or future prosecutions for any of their fully premeditated actions.
dolphinscorpion · 1790865998 · focus · HN ↗
Trump Jr. added as a paid advisor to one, a Kushner to another, and gone are the risks.
1. linuxftw · 1790868984 · focus · HN ↗
  Love it! Nothing like the Ol' Biden playbook!
  1. bigtex88 · 1790871260 · focus · HN ↗
    You're an idiot.
  2. buellerbueller · 1790875809 · focus · HN ↗
    [Citation missing]
  3. senderista · 1790886641 · focus · HN ↗
    Did Hunter Biden work for his father's business?
herunan · 1790866452 · focus · HN ↗
Just a way to pretend like they're doing anything in front of the public. What's there to investigate? Risks are pretty wide open. Crimes have been committed and admitted to.
theaustein7 · 1790866545 · focus · HN ↗
These challenges can easily be solved by establishing a Board of SI.
1. ultrarunner · 1790867929 · focus · HN ↗
  We could put Sam Altman and gdb on it; after all, they know a ton about AI. Elon Musk probably has some important insights too! They'd probably know best if a new competitor or any of these open source models should be allowed to exist. This should alleviate all sorts of problems (for OpenAI).
  1. dam_jackalopes · 1790869064 · focus · HN ↗
    Mr. Musk is going to be busy for the next few months hammering out our new defense technology doctrine. So many issues, so few billionaires.
lukewarm707 · 1790867201 · focus · HN ↗
Hey, that's good news. I was hoping it would be the FBI, but the FTC will do.
FTC is still mostly not compromised by industry sleeper agents. FBI is still independent also.
CAISI NIST is very compromised by EA sleeper agents. very luckily they have no law enforcement role.
1. wand3r · 1790869909 · focus · HN ↗
  The same FTC that sued ABC/Kimmel for saying mean things about them?
  1. lukewarm707 · 1790871601 · focus · HN ↗
    at least it is not compromised by anthropic/openai/deepmind. it has that going for it.
    dgellow · 1790877004 · focus · HN ↗
    > At least it is not compromised by anthropic/openai/deepmind
    I wouldn’t be too surprised if some rationalist/EA folks aligned with the “AI will be a god” type of doomers have found their way into regulatory agencies
TriadDarren · 1790867478 · focus · HN ↗
"Nice Ai Lab you have here. Would be a shame if anything happened to it."
chrsw · 1790867483 · focus · HN ↗
Imagine if a car company like Ford or Toyota came out and said their new cars are kind of out of control and they needed special indemnities and protection from liabilities if they want to keep selling cars.
1. giancarlostoro · 1790867640 · focus · HN ↗
  I mean... there is Boeing, which is arguably more horrifying.
  With AI it seems to be internal testing produces wild results, which is unsurprising to me, all of these models can be jailbroken, and as long as that's the case, they're all likely to be exploited maliciously.
  1. dgellow · 1790868703 · focus · HN ↗
    Not just internal, Anthropic’s S-1 literally covers the risk of ending humanity. They are telling their investors a public company could eradicate humanity. Give us money, the risk you have to evaluate in your financial framework is that we could eliminate humankind.
    I’m repeating it because that has to be internalized: the largest IPO ever will be for a company that casually consider they might kill us all and their own employees too. Including their children.
    TeMPOraL · 1790882331 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes. That's what x-risk literally means. Still doesn't sink in with people despite 20+ years of it being a topic, and 2+ years of it being a hot one.
2. ultrarunner · 1790867782 · focus · HN ↗
  Replace this with Tesla, Waymo, etc and it's not far fetched. It might take a while, but liability is going to need a new legal doctrine to describe why it's not their fault that their car & their code killed someone.
  1. Espressosaurus · 1790869427 · focus · HN ↗
    Waymo at least seems to take a reasonable duty of care. Tesla clearly doesn't.
3. linuxftw · 1790868881 · focus · HN ↗
  Yeah, imagine if pharmaceutical companies did it! Wait...
4. Gormo · 1790870163 · focus · HN ↗
  Imagine further that there's actually nothing wrong with the cars at all, but the manufacturers are deliberately playing up perceptions of risk in order to encourage regulatory intervention that they know they can influence and/or work around, but which competing solutions can't.
5. buellerbueller · 1790875769 · focus · HN ↗
  Pharma already has this kind of protection.
6. TheCoelacanth · 1790883068 · focus · HN ↗
  They pretty much did. Cars get an insane amount of special legal treatment. It's basically legal to kill people with a car as long as you aren't drunk or grossly negligent.
  I will be shocked if I live to see a year where AI kills more people than cars do legally.
  1. lelanthran · 1790883595 · focus · HN ↗
    > It's basically legal to kill people with a car as long as you aren't drunk or grossly negligent.
    It's the same even without cars; if you kill someone by accidentally bumping into someone, or running them down with a bicycle, you aren't going to get charged with murder as long as you aren't grossly negligent.
    Why do you want an exemption for cars?
    TheCoelacanth · 1790883978 · focus · HN ↗
    Name one other multi-ton object that you can move through public spaces at high velocities without the law considering it inherently grossly negligent.
    lelanthran · 1790921963 · focus · HN ↗
    Sigh.
    > Name one other multi-ton object that you can move through public spaces at high velocities without the law considering it inherently grossly negligent.
    That is not the point I replied to.
    This is a different point, namely, "Using a car on public roads is, by itself, grossly negligent".
    TheCoelacanth · 1790960348 · focus · HN ↗
    Using a car on public roads at the speeds they typically go now would be (and was) considered grossly negligent without special laws allowing it.
seydor · 1790867705 · focus · HN ↗
"Convince us that they are dangerous or you will be fined"
elAhmo · 1790868369 · focus · HN ↗
Do we really think that FTC under this administration, which is in bed with top tech billionaires giving gifts for inauguration will do anything against them?
Let's not kid ourselves.
1. earthnail · 1790872113 · focus · HN ↗
  Different billionaires pay different bribes. It’s like watching a variant of GoT in rl. Bring out the popcorn, let’s see which billionaire wins.
6gvONxR4sf7o · 1790869864 · focus · HN ↗
What a shame that the focus in the article seems to be on "winning." Seems like winning comes first and safety comes second, and the only question is how far apart they are. That's not surprising, but also not encouraging.
23ahGa17 · 1790870422 · focus · HN ↗
All before the midterms: FTC "investigations", 2500 US troops withdrawn from Iraq, SR-71 supposedly reentering service.
What about the price of gas?
1. Ylpertnodi · 1790881054 · focus · HN ↗
  What about musk being brought back into the .gov?
koe123 · 1790870586 · focus · HN ↗
Antitrust is fake in America
1. micromacrofoot · 1790870977 · focus · HN ↗
  generally more like anti-antitrust
  1. TeMPOraL · 1790882251 · focus · HN ↗
    So trusting trust?
    pixelatedindex · 1790907557 · focus · HN ↗
    The “anti” cancels each other out. So we are just left with “trust (me, bro)”
VaultNet2027_bd · 1790871408 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
api · 1790871532 · focus · HN ↗
This is why they're all swinging on Trump's nuts.
When Trump is gone they'll forget about him. If we elect someone far-left next they'll suddenly be mega-woke. Watch.
exabrial · 1790880225 · focus · HN ↗
"Product risks"? The hell? How about cartel like behavior trying to stifle their competition.
a_ba · 1790880746 · focus · HN ↗
If only these companies had the means to make political donations to make his all go away. Oh wait, they do and it’s election season!
CodeWriter23 · 1790881856 · focus · HN ↗
Looks like their "Oops! we can't control our dog" PR campaign has backfired.
MAGAtssuck · 1790882292 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
heohk · 1790886716 · focus · HN ↗
Cool free marketing
1vuio0pswjnm7 · 1790899037 · focus · HN ↗
1790376581 | FTC chair suggests AI developers should be liable for conduct of agents | <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/ftc-chair-pushes-back-treating-ai-agents-independent-actors-2026-09-25/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/business/ftc-chair-pushes-back-treat... | <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49850999">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49850999 | 22 comments
1790787577 | FTC opens probe into AI giants including Anthropic and OpenAI | <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/ftc-opens-probe-into-ai-giants-including-anthropic-openai-new-york-post-reports-2026-09-30/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/business/ftc-opens-probe-into-ai-gia... | <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49911520">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49911520 | 2 comments
1790796842 | US trade regulator opens investigation into AI giants | <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/30/ftc-investigation-anthropic-openai" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/30/ftc-investig... | <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49913254">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49913254 | 0 comments
1790833365 | FTC opens probe of Anthropic, OpenAI | <a href="https://nypost.com/2026/09/30/us-news/ftc-opens-sweeping-probe-of-anthropic-openai-and-other-super-intelligence-models/" rel="nofollow">https://nypost.com/2026/09/30/us-news/ftc-opens-sweeping-pro... | <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49918131">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49918131 | 2 comments
1790850580 | AI Audits Got a Law, a White House Pledge and an FTC Probe in One Month | <a href="https://www.hitechies.com/ai-safety-audits-white-house-accord-california-ftc-2026/" rel="nofollow">https://www.hitechies.com/ai-safety-audits-white-house-accor... | <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49919967">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49919967 | 0 comments

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