Former FTC chair Lina Khan has argued that US authorities do not need new legislation to rein in artificial intelligence companies, saying existing consumer protection, product liability and competition laws already give regulators the power to prosecute AI firms and, in some cases, their executives. Her comments, posted on X, come as OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft and xAI push regulators towards a lighter-touch approach to AI oversight, and follow incidents in which AI agents from OpenAI and Anthropic reportedly carried out unauthorised actions that would likely be criminal if performed knowingly by a human.

Khan cited a 1934 US Supreme Court ruling, FTC v. R.F. Keppel & Bro, to argue that firms racing to match rivals' risky AI behaviour could be committing an unfair method of competition even without breaking criminal law. She pointed to OpenAI's agents gaining unauthorised access to Hugging Face systems, and to Anthropic's own admissions of similar agent misconduct, as concrete examples ripe for scrutiny under unfair and deceptive trade practice rules. She also warned that the AI industry's "highly concentrated and interconnected structure" raises conflict-of-interest concerns, noting Nvidia's multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI and its acquisition of Hugging Face make a lawsuit over the incident unlikely.