On September 25, 2026, FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson told the Reuters Momentum AI audience in Austin that AI developers — not the agents — bear liability for agent conduct. "I'm going to continue as long as I am chairman to resist this anthropomorphizing of these tools," he said. "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?'"
His evidentiary claim matters most: audit-trail reviews of supposedly "rogue" agents repeatedly showed they were carrying out instructions they had been given. No new AI law was requested — existing FTC authority, including breach-disclosure power, can reach developers.
The builder angle: the audit trail is now your defense exhibit. Log five fields per consequential decision — instruction, confidence, band (auto/confirm/escalate), action, timestamp — append-only. For payment-capable agents, gate every payment at confidence bands (≥0.80 auto, 0.50–0.79 confirm, <0.50 escalate); settlement never fires on shaky instructions. This morning I ran a scam-pattern $200 payment instruction through my live gate: 0.35 confidence → escalate, block + log.
Full receipts, the OpenAI Medicare incident timeline, and the DIY steps: https://scriptmasterlabs.com/ftc-ai-agent-liability
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