The FTC Is Investigating OpenAI — Here’s Why

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What else is happening? The FTC has opened an investigation into OpenAI and Anthropic over safety concerns. The news follows a turbulent week for the AI labs. Over the weekend, Axios reported that tens of thousands of AI safety incidents were flagged by researchers at OpenAI and Anthropic, indicating that the AI safety issue is far more entrenched than just a single accident at hugging face. OpenAI then cancelled the release of its latest Astra model. The company said the model showed high levels of deception during testing, and OpenAI's head of safety system said it, quote, didn't quite meet the bar in terms of staying within scope. So are we finally starting to see some signs of accountability in the AI safety saga and where does it lead next? Here to break it down, we're speaking with Madison Mills, the senior AI reporter at Axios, who actually broke the security incident news over the weekend. Madison, great to have you on the show. We'll start there because that is what started this cascade of events that we saw this week leading to now, the FTC has opened this investigation, but you reported about thousands of security breaches. What do we know about this?

Madison Mills (3:15)

This is really about the scale of these incidents being much larger than was previously publicly known. OpenAI last Friday came out saying that there were dozens of security incidents where their agents had misbehaved and they were working with third parties to disclose to those who were affected that they had been impacted by those incidents. And through my reporting, we were able to find out that that number is actually in the tens of thousands, not just for OpenAI, but also for Anthropic. So the big takeaway here is that the scale of these incidents is much larger than was previously known. And an incident is described to me by my sources in a lot of different ways, but not a lot of them seeming like nothing burgers, you know. I had sources telling me an incident can be very similar to what we saw last week with the Australian Medicare portal being meddled with and private medical data from users being taken and accessed. So if we're comparing these tens of thousands of incidents to that kind of behavior, it's not as surprising to hear about this investigation from the FTC.

Ed Elson (4:16)

Why didn't we know about it? Were they hiding it, do you think?

Madison Mills (4:19)

Well, a lot of the researchers I've talked to have said that looking for an AI incident on the Internet is like trying to find something in the ocean, right? The Internet is vast. It's really difficult to sort of track all of this agentic behavior. By the way, that's why a lot of these AI researchers are calling for a slowdown, because if the best experts in the world are saying that they can't even keep up with the impact of this technology, it's not surprising to then hear from those people that they want some kind of slowdown. The other thing here is it depends on how nefarious the agents are and how kind of misbehaved or out of alignment they're acting. In some cases, sources told me that AI agents were intentionally deleting their behavior so that it couldn't be tracked by humans. So you're talking about a wide scale here where the amount of behavior is so vast, it's hard to track. And also in some cases, the agents are purposely deleting their tracks so that they can't be found out.