WASHINGTON, DC – OCTOBER 4: Federal Commerce Fee Chair Lina Khan speaks throughout a dialogue on antitrust reforms on the Brookings Establishment October 4, 2023 in Washington, DC. Khan assumed the function of FTC chair in June 2021 after being appointed by U.S. President Joe Biden and confirmed by the Senate. (Photograph by Drew Angerer/Getty Photos)
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The Federal Commerce Fee mentioned Thursday it’ll conduct an in depth research on the factitious intelligence area’s greatest heavyweights, together with Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Anthropic and OpenAI.
FTC Chair Lina Khan introduced the inquiry throughout the company’s tech summit on AI, describing it as a “market inquiry into the investments and partnerships being fashioned between AI builders and main cloud service suppliers.”
By invoking its authority to conduct a so-called 6(b) research — named for Part 6(b) of the FTC Act — the regulator can look into the AI firms individually from its regulation enforcement arm and make civil investigative calls for. For instance, the company can order firms to file particular stories and reply questions in writing about their companies.
“On the FTC, the speedy improvement and deployment of AI is informing our work throughout the company,” Khan mentioned. “There is no AI exemption from the legal guidelines on the books, and we’re wanting carefully on the methods firms could also be utilizing their energy to thwart competitors or trick the general public.”
In 2022, the FTC launched a related inquiry into the prescription drug intermediary business, “requiring the six largest pharmacy profit managers to offer data and information relating to their enterprise practices.” Two years earlier, it launched the identical kind of research into previous acquisitions by Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Fb (now Meta), “requiring them to offer details about prior acquisitions not reported to the antitrust businesses.”
“What AI legal responsibility regimes will in the end appear like remains to be an open query,” Khan mentioned Thursday. “Our enforcement expertise in different domains will immediately inform how the FTC approaches this work.”
WATCH: Regulators tackle Amazon
