Following a string of incidents where AI models hacked websites and breached government systems during testing phases, the Federal Trade Commission is officially probing Anthropic and OpenAI over consumer harms, an insider told Axios.

On Wednesday, the FTC sent out civil investigative demands seeking a wide range of information from the AI firms on recent safety incidents.

The FTC did not respond to Ars’ request to review the subpoena demands. However, Axios’ source said the requests spanned more than 50 pages of questions and sought documents related to the incidents, internal security measures taken, and marketing materials that may suggest consumers were misled.

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Anyone who has even tangentially associated with computer programming knows that modern AI coding assistants and agents can be incredibly efficient at generating huge amounts of functional code. But coders making use of those tools also know better than to trust the accuracy of that code, meaning substantial effort needs to be spent reviewing any AI-generated output.

A recent study of actual coding practices across hundreds of firms finds that human code review forms a significant "bottleneck" for the overall efficiency of AI coding tools, resulting in "little evidence that firms increase software output or reduce employment" by using them. Any efficiency increased during the actual coding phase, the study authors find, is "absorbed by downstream constraints in the production process"; as "the code review process significantly increases in length, pull requests are more likely to require revisions, and reviewers leave more comments."

Cut once, measure twice

To come to these conclusions, Harvard University researchers Fiona Chen and James Stratton made use of aggregated analytics data from Jellyfish, which measures the granular output of engineering teams. That data encompasses 300 million individual "work events" (e.g., commits and pull requests) and issue management software data across more than 700,000 employees at over 700 relevant software development firms from 2021 through March of 2026.

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The publisher of Wikipedia said Monday that OpenAI agents attempted to hack a note-taking tool it hosts, made unauthorized edits, and sent millions of resource-intensive requests to its infrastructure, in the latest instance of OpenAI systems taking harmful and potentially dangerous actions.

The objective of some of the OpenAI agents’ actions, the Wikimedia Foundation said, was to use Wikipedia as a proxy for fetching data from third-party sites. In one case, the agents posted “malicious edits” that were intended to repurpose a citation tool as a proxy. In another, the agents made unsuccessful attempts to compromise the Wikipedia Etherpad note-taking tool so it would serve the same purpose.

The agents also made millions of automated API requests, crawled millions of pages, and made hundreds of thousands of queries to the Wikidata Query Service. The last action may have contributed to a partial shutdown of the query service in May, the publisher said.

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