Thread

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

210 points · 160 comments · dgellow

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.”
    You get two downvotes for lies, one for each post.
    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.
    The "non-delegation" principle is about how far congress can enable other branches of government to exercise delimited forms of executive,judicial,legislative power. The "none" view is an extreme minority. No one things congress can hand the president the power to legislate. Most people think congress can create a framework in which certain details (eg., food/drug laws) can be created by agencies. That's the basis of the entire modern state, in any case.
    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. However I dont think down-voters had rival theories of government, I think they just resented a hate-thread being side-tracked into an honest discussion.
    [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 blatant 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. Funniest part is a lot of these resistors assist people like Zuck. Absolutely hilarious.
    If people truly had a backbone the labour class wouldn't so easily get rag-dolled but they do. Putting your freedom and well-being on the line takes a lot - you need to lose everything to do that.
    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?
    [deleted] · 1790881506 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
    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 ↗
    What is the reasoning for this? Do AI companies want this?
    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 ↗
    The AI discourse is full of cases where companies and their employees respect ethical boundaries at a cost to their bottom line. There was a famous incident, Project Glasswing, where Anthropic announced that they needed to do a large, collaborative cybersecurity project before they could ethically sell their newest model.
    Of course, this story also points towards how people sometimes get confused. Most opportunities companies have to be unethical are complex, so if you're not already inclined to trust a company, it's easy to come up with reasons to distrust any claims of ethical behavior they make. Maybe they didn't want to do the unethical behavior in the first place, maybe they've made up self-serving ethical standards, maybe they're just being performatively ethical as a marketing strategy and they'll misbehave when nobody's looking.
    Such commentary tends to go viral, because it's easy to propose and impossible to refute in a short comment or video.
    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? I’m not saying that’s the best way or poor way to run a business, but the blanket application of this precedent seems sketch to me. But that means we need an admin that does trust busting too, so good luck with all that.
    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... | <a href="https://www.pogo.org/commentaries/corrupted-oversight-the-faa-boeing-and-the-737-max" rel="nofollow">https://www.pogo.org/commentaries/corrupted-oversight-the-fa...
    and the 2008 financial crisis: <a href="https://sunlightfoundation.com/2008/11/24/the-revolving-door-robert-rubin-and-citigroup/" rel="nofollow">https://sunlightfoundation.com/2008/11/24/the-revolving-door...
    just to name two obscure examples that had some small impact on society
    wins32767 · 1790889926 · focus · HN ↗
    SOC2, 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 being dumped untreated 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 not to mention dark patterns, behavioral manipulation, and outright gambling
    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 ↗
    It doesn't really work that way, although I wouldn't rule out someone in the administration thinking it does. There's nothing an FTC investigator can do to "clear them" in a way that would prevent a future investigation for future instances of the same activity. An FTC decision not to bring a complaint or to request only trivial damages doesn't create a binding precedent for similar investigations later.
8. tedd4u · 1790950137 · focus · HN ↗
  And maybe put a Trump or Witkoff kid on the board.

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