Republican Congressman Jim Jordan asks Big Tech if Biden tried to censor AI
On Thursday, House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) sent letters to 16 American technology firms, including Google and OpenAI, asking for past communications with the Biden administration that might suggest the former president “coerced or colluded” with companies to “censor lawful speech” in AI products.
The Trump administration’s top technology advisors previously signaled they would pick a fight with Big Tech over “AI censorship,” which is seemingly the next phase in the culture war between conservatives and Silicon Valley. Jordan previously led an investigation into whether the Biden administration and Big Tech colluded to silence conservative voices on social media platforms. Now, he’s turning his attention to AI companies — 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.”
In this latest inquiry, Jordan asked Adobe, Alphabet, Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, Cohere, IBM, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, Palantir, Salesforce, Scale AI, and Stability AI for information. They have until March 27 to provide it.
TechCrunch reached out to the companies for comment. Most didn’t immediately respond. Nvidia, Microsoft, and Stability AI declined to comment.
There’s one notable omission in Jordan’s list: billionaire Elon Musk’s frontier AI lab, xAI. That may be because Musk, a close Trump ally, is a tech leader who has been at the forefront of conversations about 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 companies have been slower to change how their AI models treat political subject matter. Leading up to the 2024 U.S. election, Google said that its Gemini chatbot wouldn’t respond to political queries. Even well after the election, TechCrunch found that the chatbot wouldn’t consistently answer even simple questions related to politics, 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.
Maxwell Zeff is a senior reporter at TechCrunch specializing in AI and emerging technologies. Previously with Gizmodo, Bloomberg, and MSNBC, Zeff has covered the rise of AI and the Silicon Valley Bank crisis. He is based in San Francisco. When not reporting, he can be found hiking, biking, and exploring the Bay Area’s food scene.
