In a major move toward accountability, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reportedly launched an investigation into several leading artificial-intelligence firms weeks ago. 

The probe could be the first of many steps toward holding AI companies accountable for the conduct and consequences of the systems they build and deploy. That scrutiny is a necessary step both to prevent a powerful new technology from becoming an unaccountable danger to the public and to keep the focus where it belongs: on the human decisions, failures, and bad intentions behind the technology, not on a tool that cannot intend anything at all.

“Chairman Ferguson initiated an investigation into the leading AI firms a few weeks ago,” a senior FTC official told the NY Post.

“The agency has plans to compel the executives at these firms to testify about their product [and] about the dangers they allege their products may have to consumers, to Americans."

“We need to win this SI [Super Intelligence] race absolutely, and we are winning, and that’s fantastic,” the FTC official said. “And obviously, the other side, the Democrat Party, wants to destroy this technology, wants to surrender to our enemies or competitors — and that’s not something that the chairman’s interested in doing and that’s really not something the president’s interested in doing.”

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“But with that being said, the laws have to be followed,” the official added. “People talk about how we need new laws for these companies, and the chairman’s been very clear...we have plenty of laws in the books.”

This comes after FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson pledged earlier this week to “resist this anthropomorphizing” of artificial intelligence, a key feature of the fearmongering policy proposals surrounding the technology. Ferguson’s point is straightforward: AI does not possess a will of its own. It is a tool, and responsibility for its actions belongs to the people who build and control it.

However, those assumptions do not permeate the vast majority of calls to regulate AI, not from top AI CEOs, not from American politicians, and certainly not from the broader public. Consider Sen. Bernie Sanders’ proposed ban on research or development of AI that matches or exceeds human intelligence. The proposal treats a benchmark of technical capability as though it were evidence that AI is sentient, or on the verge of becoming so. That same assumption dominates much of the conversation among AI doomers, who make up a remarkably large share of the public. Rather than treating AI as a powerful tool shaped by human decisions, they increasingly portray it as an autonomous threat with intentions of its own.

The reality, of course, is far different. 

The FTC’s probe should be the first of many efforts to hold people, not AI, responsible when things go wrong. That is where federal scrutiny belongs: on the companies and individuals who build, deploy, and oversee these systems. AI has no intent or agency. Treating it as a sentient culprit does nothing to protect the public, it only lets the people responsible hide behind their creations.