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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. 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.

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