• by Wendy Davis , December 22, 2025

The Federal Trade Commission has vacated its 2024 order against the artificial intelligence firm Rytr, which the agency previously alleged enabled people to write phony reviews.

In a new order issued Monday, the agency said its prior decision was not consistent with President Donald Trump's recent executive order on artificial intelligence and America's AI Action Plan, issued in July.

Trump's executive order, issued earlier this month, includes the following statement: "It is the policy of the United States to sustain and enhance America's global AI dominance in order to promote human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security."

The FTC said Monday that the complaint it unveiled last year didn't allege the kinds of facts that would prove Rytr violated Section 5 of the FTC Act, which outlaws unfair or deceptive practices.

"Accordingly, the Order fails to provide any benefit to consumers and the public," the agency said Monday. "And because there was no violation of Section 5 of the FTC Act, the Order unduly burdens AI innovation in contravention of EO 14179 and America’s AI Action Plan."

The FTC alleged in its earlier complaint that Rytr provided subscribers “with the means to generate written content for consumer reviews that is false and deceptive,” and that its practices were unfair because they likely injured consumers and weren't outweighed by benefits.

The agency says in the new order that the 2024 complaint "contains no allegations that Rytr itself created deceptive marketing material, only that its customers might have used its tool to do so, and fails even to provide a single allegation that such false reviews were in fact created and used."

Current commission chair Andrew Ferguson dissented from the earlier decision, arguing that offering a tool that can facilitate deception doesn't in itself violate the FTC Act.

“Treating as categorically illegal a generative AI tool merely because of the possibility that someone might use it for fraud is inconsistent with our precedents and common sense,” he wrote at the time.

“And it threatens to turn honest innovators into lawbreakers and risks strangling a potentially revolutionary technology in its cradle," he added.