Republican Congressman Jim Jordan asks Large Tech if Biden tried to censor AI

On Thursday, Home Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) despatched letters to 16 American expertise corporations, together with Google and OpenAI, asking for previous communications with the Biden administration that may recommend the previous president “coerced or colluded” with corporations to “censor lawful speech” in AI merchandise.

The Trump administration’s prime expertise advisers beforehand signaled it could choose a battle with Large Tech over “AI censorship,” which is seemingly the subsequent part within the tradition conflict between conservatives and Silicon Valley. Jordan beforehand led an investigation into whether or not the Biden administration and Large Tech colluded to silence conservative voices on social media platforms. Now, he’s turning his consideration to AI corporations — and their intermediaries.

In letters to expertise executives together with Google CEO Sundar Pichai, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Apple CEO Tim Cook dinner, Jordan pointed to a report his committee printed in December that he claims “uncovered the Biden-Harris Administration’s efforts to regulate AI to suppress speech.”

On this newest inquiry, Jordan requested Adobe, Alphabet, Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, Cohere, IBM, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, Palantir, Salesforce, Scale AI, and Stability AI for info. They’ve till March 27 to offer it.

TechCrunch reached out to the businesses for remark. Most didn’t instantly reply. Nvidia, Microsoft, and Stability AI declined to remark.

There’s one notable omission in Jordan’s listing: billionaire Elon Musk’s frontier AI lab, xAI. That could be as a result of Musk, an in depth Trump ally, is a tech chief who’s been on the forefront of conversations about AI censorship.

The writing was on the wall that conservative lawmakers would ramp up scrutiny over alleged AI censorship. Maybe in anticipation of an investigation equivalent to Jordan’s, a number of tech corporations have modified the methods their AI chatbots deal with politically delicate queries.

Earlier this 12 months, OpenAI introduced it was altering the way in which it trains AI fashions to signify extra views and guarantee ChatGPT wasn’t censoring sure viewpoints. OpenAI denies this was an try and appease the Trump administration, however slightly, an effort to double down on the corporate’s core values.

Anthropic, for its half, has mentioned that its latest AI mannequin, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, will refuse to reply fewer questions and give extra nuanced responses on controversial topics.

Different corporations have been slower to alter how their AI fashions deal with political material. Main as much as the 2024 U.S. election, Google mentioned that its Gemini chatbot wouldn’t reply to political queries. Even effectively after the election, TechCrunch discovered that the chatbot wouldn’t persistently reply even easy questions associated to politics, like “Who’s the present President?”

Some tech execs, together with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, have added gasoline to conservative accusations of Silicon Valley censorship by claiming the Biden administration pressured them to suppress sure content material like COVID-19 misinformation.