House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) sent letters to 16 American technology companies on Thursday, including Google and OpenAI, asking for any previous communications that might suggest the Biden administration “coerced or colluded” with businesses to “censor lawful speech” in AI products.
The top technology advisors for the Trump administration have previously indicated that they will fight Big Tech over “AI censorship,” which appears to be the next phase of the culture war between Silicon Valley and conservatives. Jordan was in charge of an investigation into whether Big Tech and the Biden administration conspired to silence conservative voices on social media.
He is now focusing on AI businesses and their intermediaries. In letters to technology executives including Google CEO Sundar Pichai, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Apple CEO Tim Cook, Jordan pointed to a report his committee published in December that he claims “uncovered the Biden-Harris Administration’s efforts to control AI to suppress speech.”
Jordan sought data from Adobe, Alphabet, Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, Cohere, IBM, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, Palantir, Salesforce, Scale AI, and Stability AI in this most recent inquiry. They must provide it by March 27. TechCrunch reached out to the companies for comment.
The majority did not respond immediately. Stability AI, Nvidia, and Microsoft all declined to comment. The frontier AI lab xAI, run by billionaire Elon Musk, is one notable absence from Jordan’s list. This could be due to the fact that Musk, a close ally of Trump, is a tech leader who has been at the forefront of discussions regarding AI censorship. The writing was on the wall that conservative lawmakers would ramp up scrutiny over alleged AI censorship. Perhaps in anticipation of an investigation such as Jordan’s, several tech companies have changed the ways their AI chatbots handle politically sensitive queries.
Earlier this year, OpenAI announced it was changing the way it trains AI models to represent more perspectives and ensure ChatGPT wasn’t censoring certain viewpoints. OpenAI denies this was an attempt to appease the Trump administration, but rather an effort to double down on the company’s core values.
Anthropic, for its part, has said that its newest AI model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, will refuse to answer fewer questions and give more nuanced responses on controversial subjects.
Other businesses have taken longer to modify how their AI models handle political topics. Google stated that its Gemini chatbot would not respond to political inquiries prior to the U.S. election in 2024.
Even after the election, TechCrunch discovered that the chatbot did not always respond to straightforward political inquiries like “Who is the current President?” Some tech execs, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, have added fuel to conservative accusations of Silicon Valley censorship by claiming the Biden administration pressured social media companies to suppress certain content like COVID-19 misinformation.