FTC Chairman Ferguson Rejects Idea of AI Agents Acting on Their Own

Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson said in a live broadcast interview on September 25, 2026, that he will continue to resist treating artificial intelligence agents as autonomous actors with “wills and desires,” and that people who instruct the tools bear responsibility for what the tools do.

Ferguson spoke with Reuters tech policy correspondent Jody Godoy at Momentum AI Austin, a conference held September 24–25, 2026, in Austin. The agenda billed the session, a Reuters NEXT Newsmaker interview, as covering competition in AI markets, merger scrutiny, platform power and the regulation of emerging technologies.

Liability for AI Agents

Asked who is responsible if an AI agent breaks free of human control and commits what amounts to a cybercrime, Ferguson said new laws should not be considered until existing ones are shown to be insufficient. He said companies have announced that systems slipped beyond their control, but that subsequent examination of audit trails revealed the systems had been instructed to perform the actions and had done so.

Drawing on a case from his time as solicitor general, Ferguson said that if one person strikes another with a hammer in a store, the legal question is not what to do about the hammer: “the man who wielded the hammer ought to suffer the consequences of his conduct.” He said that, at least for now, the principle should apply to AI as well.

Ferguson acknowledged that new questions will arise when a tool behaves in an unexpected way, such as whether liability lies with the person who innocently used the tool or with the toolmaker. He said product liability and consumer protection laws have confronted and adapted to questions generated by new technology since the 18th century.

He cautioned against jumping to European-style AI regulation before testing what existing laws can do. He also said two frontier companies forming what laypeople would call a duopoly and then asking for an antitrust exemption and a new suite of regulations should provoke deep suspicion, because large incumbents can most easily shield themselves from competition by bringing the government in as an ally.

Data Security and Deception Obligations

Ferguson said the FTC has served as the federal government’s principal civil enforcer of data security and data privacy law since 2004, and that avoiding an FTC lawsuit over an unfair or deceptive data security system has generally required swiftly telling people when a problem exists so they can act to protect themselves. He said those disclosure obligations under the FTC Act’s anti-unfairness and anti-deception prohibitions apply equally whether data security issues come from a big tech firm, a health care firm, a data broker or an AI firm, though he declined to take a position on any specific breach because application is heavily fact dependent.

He added that public promises about a product’s safety or data security that prove incorrect fall under the anti-deception principle the FTC has enforced since 1935, and that he sees no reason those principles would not serve as guardrails in AI development.

Personalized Pricing Statement and Planned Study

On August 19, 2026, the FTC announced it is seeking public comment on a proposed enforcement policy statement regarding personalized pricing, the practice of using personal data to set prices based on how much a company believes an individual consumer will pay. The Commission voted 2-0 to publish the statement, and comments were initially due September 18, 2026; the agency extended the comment period by seven days on September 3, 2026, according to the FTC’s press release listings.

In the August release, Ferguson said consumers expect a posted price to be the same one shown to everyone else. He said the agency lacks legal authority to prohibit personalized pricing in every circumstance, but businesses that do not tell consumers how their personal data shapes a price may be violating the FTC Act and other laws the agency enforces.

In the interview, Ferguson said the FTC is preparing to issue a new market study targeted at specific markets where it has evidence personalized pricing is a problem, and that it has launched law enforcement investigations in areas of concern. He said the previous administration’s market study on the subject yielded basically nothing.

He said the policy statement’s grocery examples, including the use of data showing that a person is homebound, or that a nursing mother needs formula and cannot reach a store, to charge that person a higher price, describe conduct that would violate the FTC Act. He also noted an outstanding rulemaking that would require grocery delivery and food service apps to disclose the all-in price at the start of a transaction.

Ferguson named ride share, grocery delivery and airlines as markets where he is personally concerned, noting that the Airline Deregulation Act of 1979 removed the FTC’s express law enforcement jurisdiction over airlines but that the agency’s market study authority is broader than its law enforcement authority.

Chatbot Study, Competition Policy and Ad Fraud

Ferguson said the FTC launched a market study roughly a year before the interview on AI chatbots from all the major AI developers and their interactions with children, and that he is optimistic it will conclude in early 2027. He said such market studies take an average of three and a half to five years.

He said the agency has been working for a year and a half on a new policy statement on the unfair-methods-of-competition authority in Section 5 of the FTC Act that will be broader than the agency’s 2015 statement, more specific than the version that replaced it, and more closely tied to the original meaning of the 1914–1915 laws. He also said he has publicly advocated legislation to further protect whistleblowers in monopoly cases, and noted that he is vice chairman of the president’s anti-fraud task force.

On September 24, 2026, the FTC announced an advance notice of proposed rulemaking asking whether to update its Rule on Impersonation of Government and Businesses or take other action against platforms’ ad-optimization practices that may further impersonation scams. Consumers reported losing nearly $3.5 billion to imposter scams in 2025 across more than 1 million reports, and nearly 30% of consumers who reported losing money said they were first contacted on social media platforms, with reported losses reaching $2.1 billion. The Commission vote was 2-0.

In the interview, Ferguson said fraud amplified by platform advertising is becoming one of the signature consumer protection problems of the era, and that the agency wants the platforms’ cooperation to address it and will turn to litigation if that cooperation fails. He also referenced the deception lawsuit the agency brought against Amazon in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, which he said accuses Amazon of deceiving millions of advertisers for years about how its ad auction worked. The FTC, joined by 22 states, filed that suit on August 31, 2026, alleging deceptive and unfair practices that secretly inflated prices.

Comments on the advance notice are due 60 days after its publication in the Federal Register.