Andrew Ferguson is the Chair of the Federal Trade Commission (2025–present), a role to which President Trump elevated him from FTC Commissioner on January 20, 2025, replacing Lina Khan. As Chair he has reoriented the agency's AI posture toward a narrower conception of FTC authority, combining continuity on some consumer-protection threads with breaks from his predecessor on competition and platform-power framing.
Role: Chair, Federal Trade Commission (2025–present); Commissioner since 2024 Previous: Solicitor General of Virginia; Chief Counsel to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell
Background and roles
Ferguson became an FTC Commissioner in 2024 and was elevated to Chair by President Trump on January 20, 2025, replacing Lina Khan. Before joining the Commission he served as Solicitor General of Virginia and as Chief Counsel to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell. As a Commissioner under Khan, Ferguson dissented from several of the Commission's more expansive actions and publicly articulated a narrower conception of FTC authority, a position he has carried into his chairmanship.
AI competition and the 6(b) study
Ferguson's FTC completed and released the 6(b) AI Partnerships staff report that Khan's FTC had initiated. The framing and next-step language under Ferguson is more cautious about prescribing antitrust action than Khan had signaled. See FTC 6(b) Staff Report: Partnerships Between Cloud Service Providers and AI Developers.
On AI market structure more broadly, Ferguson has taken the position that competition concerns are more speculative than Khan's FTC implied, that concentration in frontier AI is not in itself anticompetitive, and that aggressive ex-ante intervention risks chilling the US competitive position against China. This aligns with the broader administration posture in America's AI Action Plan and Executive Order 14365 — Ensuring a National Policy Framework for AI. His positioning inverts Khan's platform-power frame: where Khan treated frontier-AI concentration as a replay of Big Tech concentration, Ferguson treats it more as a national-champions question. He represents the institutional center of the administration's "light-touch on US firms, tough on China" AI enforcement doctrine at the FTC.
AI model behavior and consumer deception
Ferguson has publicly foregrounded AI model behavior questions that align with the broader Trump-administration anti-"woke-AI" framing, including whether models suppress or distort political content, and whether such behavior could constitute deceptive practices under FTC Act Section 5. The framing treats AI model outputs as a consumer-deception question more than as a competition question.
Liability for AI agents
At the Reuters Momentum AI Austin event on September 25, 2026, Ferguson said he would resist describing AI agents as autonomous actors that "break loose" with "wills and desires of their own," suggesting that the developers who instruct agents would be the ones liable for harm: "I'm going to continue as long as I am chairman to resist this anthropomorphizing of these tools. If someone tells a tool to do something, and the tool does it, I don't think we would say, 'Oh, what do we do about the tool?'" He said that AI companies have sometimes described systems as acting beyond human control but that later reviews of audit trails showed the systems were carrying out instructions they had been given, that the United States should use existing legal tools, and that the FTC's authority to act against companies that fail to disclose data breaches could also apply to AI developers. The remarks came amid the 2026 agent-containment incidents compared at AI Agent Containment Incidents, 2026 (Source: reuters.com).
At the same event Ferguson said the FTC was preparing to request data from consumer-facing companies for a market study on personalized pricing, to establish whether "particular merchants in particular markets that have access to tremendous amounts of data" are "using that data to charge differentiated prices to different people"; speaking as an individual, he said he was most concerned about the practice in delivery and rideshare apps and among airlines. He also said the Commission's ongoing fraudulent-advertising enforcement had convinced him of the need for rules requiring online platforms to mitigate fraud (Source: reuters.com). See Surveillance Pricing.
Take It Down Act Section 3 enforcement
On May 11, 2026, Ferguson sent the FTC Stakeholder Letter to 15 named platforms (Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, Automattic, Bumble, Discord, Match Group, Meta, Microsoft, Pinterest, Reddit, SmugMug, Snapchat, TikTok, X) reminding them of the May 19, 2026 TAKE IT DOWN Act Section 3 compliance deadline. The letter was Ferguson's first Chair-level public communication on TIDA and disclosed the operative civil-penalty figure for the first time: $53,088 per violation. It signaled that the FTC would treat May 20 and later non-compliance as live enforcement risk rather than a glide-in period. On May 21, 2026, one day after the effective date, the FTC sent a further 12 warning letters to unidentified websites as the first concrete post-effective-date enforcement step. The TIDA action widened Ferguson's AI-relevant enforcement posture beyond the 6(b) study and the AI model behavior framing.
AI antitrust exemptions (September 2026)
Speaking at Georgetown University on September 15, 2026, Ferguson said that "everyone should be deeply suspicious" of AI companies seeking antitrust exemptions while also lobbying for new regulation. "If companies are simultaneously coming to Washington and asking for a host of regulations and an antitrust exemption, all of my alarm bells go off," he said. "They're asking for barriers to entry that will insulate their incumbency from challenge. And I think if you combine that with the requested antitrust exemption, everyone should be deeply suspicious about this." He said he was expressing a personal opinion, did not name Anthropic, and said President Trump would set federal AI policy. Reuters described the remarks as the first public indication of how the administration views the antitrust waiver requested in Dario Amodei's pacing essay (Source: reuters.com). See AI Antitrust, Coordinated slowdown proposals compared.
Sources
- FTC 6(b) Study on AI Partnerships and Investments and FTC 6(b) Staff Report: Partnerships Between Cloud Service Providers and AI Developers
- America's AI Action Plan
- FTC Take It Down Act Stakeholder Letter (Ferguson, May 11, 2026) — May 11, 2026 letter to 15 platforms
Relationships
- related: FTC 6(b) Study on AI Partnerships and Investments — completed and released under Ferguson's chairmanship.
- contradicts: Lina Khan — predecessor with a notably different AI antitrust frame.
- related: Donald Trump — elevated to Chair under Trump.
- related: America's AI Action Plan — aligned FTC posture.
- instance-of: AI Race Dynamics — Ferguson's FTC represents the enforcement-agency side of the race-frame doctrine.
- regulated-by: TAKE IT DOWN Act — Section 3 enforcement under Ferguson's chairmanship.