Former FTC chair Lina Khan wants the federal government to know it doesn't need new laws to address AI threats. There are already laws and regulations on the books, including a 92-year-old Supreme Court precedent, that could be used to hold AI companies and, in some circumstances, their executives accountable for their actions. Khan's comments on X Sunday follow a flurry of activity from the leadership of Open AI, Anthropic, Microsoft, and x AI aimed at trying to corner regulators into giving them their way. The former Biden administration trust buster pointed to numerous examples of current laws, and prior precedent, that could be used to hold frontier labs to account, even if they're currently doing all in their power to change the conversation.

"We shouldn't let discussions about new legal regimes distract from the fact that there's no AI exemption from laws already on the books," Khan said. "Law enforcers already have authority to charge companies and their CEOs for creating and releasing dangerous, unvetted, or defective products."

Khan points to a 1934 US Supreme Court decision, FTC v. R.F. Keppel & Bro, to argue that the current battle between American frontier labs could amount to an unfair method of competition. She notes that Open AI's agents broke out of their intended sandbox and gained unauthorized access to Hugging Face systems - conduct that could raise serious criminal-law questions if carried out knowingly by a human. Khan also highlights the "highly concentrated and interconnected structure" of the AI industry as meriting scrutiny for its potential to create major risks and conflicts of interest.