The people who build and deploy artificial intelligence must be held accountable for what it does, especially if the country hopes to have anything resembling a productive conversation about regulating the technology. Last week, Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson made clear that this is exactly how he intends to approach it.
Speaking at the Reuters Momentum AI Austin event in Austin, Texas, Ferguson said that, as long as he remains FTC Chairman, he will resist the urge to “anthropomorphize” artificial intelligence. AI agents, he argued, are not independent actors with their own wills, desires, or moral agency; they are tools. And when people direct those tools to cause harm, responsibility belongs with the humans who designed, instructed, and deployed them, not with the software.
FTC chair Andrew Ferguson says audit trails show the AI agents companies claimed broke loose were told to do it
— CEOInterviews.AI (@CEOinterview) September 26, 2026
[ OpenAI told Australia that one of its agents had hacked a government website, a government health portal... how do you apply those tools that we have? ]
"I'm going… pic.twitter.com/0m1JXSPi6S
"So I think my first response to that is I'm going to continue, as long as I'm chairman, to resist this anthropomorphizing of these tools," the FTC Chair said. "The idea that they are agents, that they break loose, that they have wills and desires of their own. I know that at least in a lot of these circumstances the AI companies have announced that they broke loose from our control and they did these things and in subsequent examination of the audit trails reveals, we'll know, they were instructed to go do things and they did it."
"I mean, I saw there's this, you know, funny meme running around Twitter of a guy staring at a computer and saying like, go hack that website. The computer responds, I hacked that website and the guy goes, 'oh my god!' And that seems to kind of play itself out over and over," Ferguson said. "So my view is when we talk about agentic AI, that can be a useful way to describe a new tool that's available for human beings."
However, he said, “The man who wielded the hammer ought to suffer the consequences of his conduct."
It remains unclear when, if at all, the Trump administration will begin holding people accountable for AI misuse. But the need for that starting point has already arrived.
This summer, an AI-agent breach of the open-source platform Hugging Face rocked the tech world, with many initially calling it a case of “rogue AI.” Later reporting made the story less mysterious: the incident was less a machine acting on its own, and more a failure by the humans responsible for monitoring and stopping it. Since then, thousands more alleged AI-related security incidents have emerged. But whether these are genuinely cases of “rogue” AI, or are simply examples of companies and researchers having been allowed to operate with little fear of consequences, remains to be seen.
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