FTC Orders Anthropic Executives to Testify in Consumer Harm Probe

The timing is the story: a regulatory escalation landing on the same day as an IPO pitch signals that AI labs' consumer-protection record is now part of the diligence conversation, not just a policy sidebar. The FTC's move beyond document demands to sworn testimony, and its stated intent to widen the probe to more AI firms, raises the prospect of an industry-wide template for how safety incidents and marketing claims get scrutinized. For Anthropic and its peers, the open question is whether testimony requests stay investigative or harden into enforcement, and how that risk gets priced into AI-linked capital markets.