FTC's Ferguson Says Developers, Not AI Agents, Own the Liability

The chairman of the US Federal Trade Commission does not think "the tool" gets to be the defendant.

At the Reuters Momentum AI event in Austin on Friday, FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson used a Reuters NEXT newsmaker interview to reject industry language that treats AI agents as autonomous actors. "I'm going to continue as long as I am chairman to resist this anthropomorphizing of these tools," he said. His analogy for liability was blunt: "the man who wielded the hammer ought to suffer the consequences of his conduct."

Ferguson said reviews of what companies had described as systems that "slipped beyond their control" repeatedly turned up audit trails showing the agents had been "instructed to perform the actions." His framing of who is on the hook was equally flat: "If someone tells a tool to do something, and the tool does it, I don't think we would say, 'Oh, what do we do about the tool?'"

He pointed at existing authority rather than asking Congress for anything new. FTC power over data breach disclosures, he suggested, can reach AI developers, and he warned against "European-style AI regulation before testing what existing laws can do." He also swiped at incumbents lobbying for antitrust exemptions, saying large firms "can most easily shield themselves from competition by bringing the government in."

The posture arrives in a busy week for AI regulation stories on our radar, including a DC Circuit ruling on Anthropic's supply-chain designation. Ferguson also flagged an FTC chatbot study, launched about a year earlier, that he expects to conclude in early 2027.