On Thursday, Home Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) sent letters to 16 American technology firms, together with Google and OpenAI, asking for previous communications with the Biden Administration that may recommend the previous President “coerced or colluded” with firms to “censor lawful speech” in AI merchandise.
The Trump Administration’s top technology advisers previously signaled it would pick a fight with Big Tech over “AI censorship,” which is seemingly the subsequent section within the tradition conflict between conservatives and Silicon Valley. Jordan beforehand 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 consideration to AI firms — 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 supply 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 record: billionaire Elon Musk’s frontier AI lab, xAI. That could be as a result of Musk, a detailed Trump ally, is a tech chief who’s 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. Maybe in anticipation of an investigation similar to Jordan’s, a number of tech firms have modified the methods their AI chatbots deal with politically delicate queries.
Earlier this yr, OpenAI announced it was changing the way it trains AI models to signify extra views and guarantee ChatGPT wasn’t censoring sure viewpoints. OpenAI denies this was an try to appease the Trump administration, however reasonably, 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 more nuanced responses on controversial subjects.
Different firms have been slower to vary 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 properly after the election, TechCrunch discovered that the chatbot wouldn’t consistently answer even simple questions related 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 certain content like COVID-19 misinformation.
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