Republican Rep. Jim Jordan asks Big Tech if Biden tried to censor AI
House Attorney Jim Jordan (R-OH) on Thursday. Sent a letter to 16 American technology companiesIt suggests that the former president “forced or conspired” to “censor” AI products in pursuit of past communications with the Biden administration, including Google and Openai.
Trump administration Top technology advisors previously said they would “chose against big technology over AI censorship.”,” this appears to be the next stage in the culture war between conservatives and Silicon Valley. Jordan led the investigation previously Whether the Biden administration and Big Technology conspired to silence conservative voices Social media platforms. Now he’s focusing on AI companies and their intermediaries.
In a letter to technology executives, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Openai CEO Sam Altman and Apple CEO Tim Cook, Jordan said Report His committee announced in December, he claimed that it “revealed the Biden-Harris administration’s efforts to control AI to curb speech.”
In this latest inquiry, Jordan asked Adobe, Alphabet, Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, Cohere, IBM, frect, Meta, Microsoft, nvidia, Openai, Palantir, Salesforce, Scale AI, and Stability AI about the information. They must provide it until March 27th.
TechCrunch reached the company for comment. Most did not respond immediately. Nvidia, Microsoft, and Stability AI declined to comment.
There is one notable omission on the Jordan list: frontier AI lab of billionaire Elon Musk, Xai. Because it is a close Trump ally; At the forefront of conversations about AI censorship.
Writing is on the wall, and conservative lawmakers will step up scrutiny over alleged AI censorship. Perhaps in anticipation of research like Jordan, some tech companies have changed the way AI chatbots handle politically sensitive queries.
Early this year, Openai announced that it is changing the way it trains its AI models To express more perspectives and make sure ChatGPT does not censor specific perspectives. Openai denied that this is an attempt to appease the Trump administration, but rather an effort to double the company’s core values.
Humanity has said that its latest AI model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, will refuse to answer fewer questions. Gives a more subtle response to controversial subjects.
Other companies are slower to change how AI models deal with political subjects. Until the 2024 US election, Google said Gemini’s chatbots would not respond to political questions. Even after the election, TechCrunch found it Chatbots don’t consistently answer even simple questions related to politicslike, “Who is the current president?”
Some technicians, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, added fuel to conservative accusations of Silicon Valley censorship Biden administration claims pressured it to curb certain content, such as Covid-19 misinformation.