FTC is investigating OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI companies over product risks | Hacker News Reader

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

cnbc.com

25 pointsdgellow71 comments

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: https://archive.ph/IMer9

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.

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?

Do you want this? Almost a USSR style system?

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.

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] https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Americ...

Big Beautiful Bribe

Marked your comment as a favorite. May even frame it. And display it this Halloween. Haunting.

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

I was incredibly more naive and idealistic 2 years ago. Seeing the world more accurately than I did before has been quite the shock

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.

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.

There’s no denying that this administration has taken corruption to a new level

You might want to look into teapot dome

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.

Perhaps once they all agree to calling it "superintelligence", these troubles will go away.

https://america.gov isn't even calling artificial intelligence "super intelligence". Trump just says words. People should stop trying to find meaning in them.

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.

Can’t make money off of Slovenian domains without the rebrand. That’s obviously going to take precedence for the king.

> 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

Yeah, why should anybody care what the president of the united states says. It's just words. You shouldn't find meaning in them

There was actually an Executive Order on this two days ago: 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.

there's also regulatory capture where regulators get hired by these companies for six-to-seven figure jobs once they're out

https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/us-government-regulat...

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.

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.

You aren't thinking like a fascist. This will be used as leverage in exchange for midterm or 2028 election help.

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, there is no way to predict how that will play out

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.

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…

> he has already made it quite clear that he both does not consider AI to be an issue

which is putting it very mildly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49824686

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!"

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.

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!

Do you have any evidence of this assertion? What is 'cost price' and what is being sold below that?

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.

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?

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

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.

> 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 ...

For the antitrust argument, that is irrelevant.

I don't think so. But maybe your definition of fair competition is more narrow than mine.

I think the previous commenter is referring to the actual legally applicable definition, not his own definition or yours.

Frying pan infomercials say I'm getting a £200 value for only £29.99. I'd take their claims with a pinch of salt

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:

https://inferencex.semianalysis.com/run/kimi-k3-on-b200

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.

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.

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.

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.

Trump Jr. added as a paid advisor to one, a Kushner to another, and gone are the risks.

Love it! Nothing like the Ol' Biden playbook!

You're an idiot.

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.

These challenges can easily be solved by establishing a Board of SI.

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).

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.

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.

The same FTC that sued ABC/Kimmel for saying mean things about them?

"Nice Ai Lab you have here. Would be a shame if anything happened to it."

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.

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.

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.

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.

Waymo at least seems to take a reasonable duty of care. Tesla clearly doesn't.

Yeah, imagine if pharmaceutical companies did it! Wait...

Imagine further that there's actually nothing unusually 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.

"Convince us that they are dangerous or you will be fined"

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.

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.

All before the midterms: FTC "investigations", 2500 US troops withdrawn from Iraq, SR-71 supposedly reentering service.

What about the price of gas?

Antitrust is fake in America

generally more like anti-antitrust

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