Four federal U.S. agencies issued a warning on Tuesday that they already have the authority to tackle harms caused by artificial intelligence bias and they plan to use it.
The warning comes as Congress is grappling with how it should take action to protect Americans from potential risks stemming from AI. The urgency behind that push has increased as the technology has rapidly advanced with tools that are readily accessible to consumers, like OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT. Earlier this month, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., announced he’s working toward a broad framework for AI legislation, indicating it’s an important priority in Congress.
But even as lawmakers attempt to write targeted rules for the new technology, regulators asserted they already have the tools to pursue companies abusing or misusing AI in a variety of ways.
In a joint announcement from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Department of Justice, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Federal Trade Commission, regulators laid out some of the ways existing laws would allow them to take action against companies for their use of AI.
For example, the CFPB is looking into so-called digital redlining, or housing discrimination that results from bias in lending or home-valuation algorithms, according to Rohit Chopra, the agency’s director. CFPB also plans to propose rules to ensure AI valuation models for residential real estate have safeguards against discrimination.
“There is not an exemption in our nation’s civil rights laws for new technologies and artificial intelligence that engages in unlawful discrimination,” Chopra told reporters during a virtual press conference Tuesday.
“Each agency here today has legal authorities to readily combat AI-driven harm,” FTC Chair Lina Khan said. “Firms should be on notice that systems that bolster fraud or perpetuate unlawful bias can violate the FTC Act. There is no AI exemption to the laws on the books.”
Khan added the FTC stands ready to hold companies accountable for their claims of what their AI technology can do, adding enforcing against deceptive marketing has long been part of the agency’s expertise.
The FTC is also prepared to take action against companies that unlawfully seek to block new entrants to AI markets, Khan said.
“A handful of powerful firms today control the necessary raw materials, not only the vast stores of data but also the cloud services and computing power, that startups and other businesses rely on to develop and deploy AI products,” Khan said. “And this control could create the opportunity for firms to engage in unfair methods of competition.”
Kristen Clarke, assistant attorney general for the DOJ Civil Rights Division, pointed to a prior settlement with Meta over allegations that the company had used algorithms that unlawfully discriminated on the basis of sex and race in displaying housing ads.
“The Civil Rights Division is committed to using federal civil rights laws to hold companies accountable when they use artificial intelligence in ways that prove discriminatory,” Clarke said.
EEOC Chair Charlotte Burrows noted the use of AI for hiring and recruitment, saying it can result in biased decisions if trained on biased datasets. That practice may look like screening out all candidates who don’t look like those in the select group the AI was trained to identify.
Still, regulators also acknowledged there’s room for Congress to act.
“I do believe that it’s important for Congress to be looking at this,” Burrows said. “I don’t want in any way the fact that I think we have pretty robust tools for some of the problems that we’re seeing to in any way undermine those important conversations and the thought that we need to do more as well.”
“Artificial intelligence poses some of the greatest modern day threats when it comes to discrimination today and these issues warrant closer study and examination by policymakers and others,” said Clarke, adding that in the meantime agencies have “an arsenal of bedrock civil rights laws” to “hold bad actors accountable.”
“While we continue with enforcement on the agency side, we’ve welcomed work that others might do to figure out how we can ensure that we are keeping up with the escalating threats that we see today,” Clarke said.
Elon Musk looks on as U.S. President Donald Trump meets South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 21, 2025.
Kevin Lamarque | Reuters
The Elon Musk-owned social media platform X experienced a brief outage on Saturday morning, with tens of thousands of users reportedly unable to use the site.
About 25,000 users reported issues with the platform, according to the analytics platform Downdetector, which gathers data from users to monitor issues with various platforms.
Roughly 21,000 users reported issues just after 8:30 a.m. ET, per the analytics platform.
The issues appeared to be largely resolved by around 9:55 a.m., when about 2,000 users were reporting issues with the platform.
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X did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Additional information on the outage was not available.
Musk, the billionaire owner of SpaceX and Tesla, acquired X, formerly known as Twitter in 2022.
The site has had a number of widespread outages since the acquisition.
Artificial intelligence robot looking at futuristic digital data display.
Yuichiro Chino | Moment | Getty Images
Businesses are turning to artificial intelligence tools to help them navigate real-world turbulence in global trade.
Several tech firms told CNBC say they’re deploying the nascent technology to visualize businesses’ global supply chains — from the materials that are used to form products, to where those goods are being shipped from — and understand how they’re affected by U.S. President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs.
Last week, Salesforce said it had developed a new import specialist AI agent that can “instantly process changes for all 20,000 product categories in the U.S. customs system and then take action on them” as needed, to help navigate changes to tariff systems.
Engineers at the U.S. software giant used the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, a 4,400-page document of tariffs on goods imported to the U.S., to inform answers generated by the agent.
“The sheer pace and complexity of global tariff changes make it nearly impossible for most businesses to keep up manually,” Eric Loeb, executive vice president of government affairs at Salesforce, told CNBC. “In the past, companies might have relied on small teams of in-house experts to keep pace.”
Firms say that AI systems are enabling them to take decisions on adjustments to their global supply chains much faster.
Andrew Bell, chief product officer of supply chain management software firm Kinaxis, said that manufacturers and distributors looking to inform their response to tariffs are using his firm’s machine learning technology to assess their products and the materials that go into them, as well as external signals like news articles and macroeconomic data.
“With that information, we can start doing some of those simulations of, here is a particular part that is in your build material that has a significant tariff. If you switched to using this other part instead, what would the impact be overall?” Bell told CNBC.
‘AI’s moment to shine’
Trump’s tariffs list — which covers dozens of countries — has forced companies to rethink their supply chains and pricing, with the likes of Walmart and Nikealready raising prices on some products. The U.S. imported about $3.3 trillion of goods in 2024, according to census data.
Uncertainty from the U.S. tariff measures “actually probably presents AI’s moment to shine,” Zack Kass, a futurist and former head of OpenAI’s go-to-market strategy, told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro at the Ambrosetti Forum in Italy last month.
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“If you wonder how hard things could get without AI vis-a-vis automation, and what would happen in a world where you can’t just employ a bunch of people overnight, AI presents this alternative proposal,” he added.
Nagendra Bandaru, managing partner and global head of technology services at Indian IT giant Wipro, said clients are using the company’s agentic AI solutions “to pivot supplier strategies, adjust trade lanes, and manage duty exposure dynamically as policy landscapes evolve.”
Wipro says it uses a range of AI systems — both proprietary and supplied by third parties — from large language models to traditional machine learning and computer vision techniques to inspect physical assets in cross-border transit.
‘Not a silver bullet’
While it preferred to keep company names confidential, Wipro said that firms using its AI products to navigate Trump’s tariffs range from a Fortune 500 electronics manufacturer with factories in Asia to an automotive parts supplier exporting to Europe and North America.
“AI is a powerful enabler — but not a silver bullet,” Bandaru told CNBC. “It doesn’t replace trade policy strategy, it enhances it by transforming global trade from a reactive challenge into a proactive, data-driven advantage.”
AI was already a key investment priority for global firms prior to Trump’s sweeping tariff announcements on April. Nearly three-quarters of business leaders ranked AI and generative AI in their top three technologies for investment in 2025, according to a report by Capgemini published in January.
“There are a number of ways AI can assist companies dealing with the tariffs and resulting uncertainty. But any AI solution’s success will be predicated on the quality of the data it has access to,” Ajay Agarwal, partner at Bain Capital Ventures, told CNBC.
The venture capitalist said that one of his portfolio companies, FourKites, uses supply chain network data with AI to help firms understand the logistics impacts of adjusting suppliers due to tariffs.
“They are working with a number of Fortune 500 companies to leverage their agents for freight and ocean to provide this level of visibility and intelligence,” Agarwal said.
“Switching suppliers may reduce tariffs costs, but might increase lead times and transportation costs,” he added. “In addition, the volatility of the tariffs [has] severely impacted the rates and capacity available in both the ocean and the domestic freight networks.”
A Zoox autonomous robotaxi in San Francisco, California, US, on Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Amazon‘s Zoox robotaxi unit issued a voluntary recall of its software for the second time in a month following a recent crash in San Francisco.
On May 8, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi was turning at low speed when it was struck by an electric scooter rider after braking to yield at an intersection. The person on the scooter declined medical attention after sustaining minor injuries as a result of the collision, Zoox said.
“The Zoox vehicle was stopped at the time of contact,” the company said in a blog post. “The e-scooterist fell to the ground directly next to the vehicle. The robotaxi then began to move and stopped after completing the turn, but did not make further contact with the e-scooterist.”
Zoox said it submitted a voluntary software recall report to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Thursday.
A Zoox spokesperson said the notice should be published on the NHTSA website early next week. The recall affected 270 vehicles, the spokesperson said.
The NHTSA said in a statement it had received the recall notice and that the agency “advises road users to be cautious in the vicinity of vehicles because drivers may incorrectly predict the travel path of a cyclist or scooter rider or come to an unexpected stop.”
If an autonomous vehicle continues to move after contact with any nearby vulnerable road user, it risks causing harm or further harm. In the AV industry, General Motors-backed Cruise exited the robotaxi business after a collision in which one of its vehicles injured a pedestrian who had been struck by a human-driven car and was then rolled over by the Cruise AV.
Zoox’s May incident comes roughly two weeks after the company announced a separate voluntary software recall following a recent Las Vegas crash. In that incident, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi collided with a passenger vehicle, resulting in minor damage to both vehicles.
The company issued a software recall for 270 of its robotaxis in order to address a defect with its automated driving system that could cause it to inaccurately predict the movement of another car, increasing the “risk of a crash.”
Amazon acquired Zoox in 2020 for more than $1 billion, announcing at the time that the deal would help bring the self-driving technology company’s “vision for autonomous ride-hailing to reality.”
While Zoox is in a testing and development stage with its AVs on public roads in the U.S., Alphabet’s Waymo is already operating commercial, driverless ride-hailing services in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin, Texas, and is ramping up in Atlanta.
Teslais promising it will launch its long-delayed robotaxis in Austin next month, and, if all goes well, plans to expand after that to San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Antonio, Texas.