{"article":{"slug":"ftc-chair-ai-agent-liability","kind":"rule","source":{"title":"FTC Chair Pushes Back on Treating AI Agents as Independent Actors","url":"https://money.usnews.com/investing/news/articles/2026-09-25/reuters-next-ftc-chair-pushes-back-on-treating-ai-agents-as-independent-actors","date":"2026-09-25"},"headline":"If your AI agent misbehaves, the FTC chair says the blame is yours","whatChanged":"FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson spoke with Reuters at a conference in Austin on September 25. He said he will resist treating AI agents as independent actors with wills of their own. Audit trails of supposedly rogue agents, he said, keep showing them carrying out the instructions they were given, so responsibility sits with the people who instruct them. He added that new laws should wait until existing ones prove insufficient. These were interview remarks, not a policy statement or rule.","whyItMatters":"Any company letting agents send customer emails, issue refunds, or change records can read this as a preview of how the FTC would approach a problem: it would look at the company, under consumer-protection law that already exists. The audit-trail point is the practical one. If a team cannot reconstruct what an agent was told and what it did, it has no way to show a mistake was a one-off. The remarks carry no legal force on their own.","issuer":"FTC","glance":"FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson said on September 25 that the people who instruct AI agents are responsible for what the agents do.","status":"reported","action":"Confirm each agent in production logs its instructions and actions somewhere a reviewer can read them.","companyLabel":"Public edition"},"issue":{"id":"2026-09-28","publishedLabel":"Week of September 28, 2026","isLatest":false},"position":{"index":4,"total":6},"next":{"slug":"senate-ai-systems-transparency-act","headline":"Four senators want AI labs to publish model cards, with the FTC enforcing"},"session":null}