Republican Congressman Jim Jordan asks Big Tech if Biden tried to censor AI
On Thursday, Judiciary chairman Jim Jordan (R-Oh) Sent letters to 16 American technology companiesIncluding Google and OpenAI, asking for communication from the past with the BIDEN administration that could suggest that the former president “forced or collaborated” with companies to censor “legal speech” in AI products.
The top technology advisers of the Trump administration previously indicated that it would opt for a fight with Big Tech for ‘AI censorship’, which apparently is the next phase in the cultural war between conservatives and Silicon Valley. Jordan previously led an investigation In the question whether the Biden Administration and Big Tech worked together to silence conservative voices Social media platforms. Now he focuses his attention on AI companies – and their intermediaries.
In letters to technological managers, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai, OpenAi CEO Sam Altman and Apple CEO Tim Cook, Jordan pointed to one report His committee published in December that he claimed that “the efforts of the Biden-Harris administration to control AI has discovered to suppress the speech.”
In this last study, Jordan asked Adobe, Alphabet, Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, Cohere, IBM, Imborce, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, Palantir, Salesforce, Scale AI and Stability AI for information. They have until 27 March to provide it.
WAN presented the companies for comment. Most did not respond immediately. Nvidia, Microsoft and Stability AI refused to comment.
There is one remarkable omission in the Jordan list: billionaire Elon Musk’s Frontier Ai Lab, Xai. That can be because Musk, a close ally of Trump, is a tech leader who is paramount in conversations about AI censorship.
Writing was on the wall that conservative legislators would solve the investigation about alleged AI censorship. Perhaps pending a study such as Jordan’s, various technology companies have changed the ways in which their AI chatbots deal with politically sensitive questions.
Earlier this year, OpenAi announced that it is the way in which the AI models train changed to represent more perspectives and to ensure that Chatgpt did not censure certain points of view. OpenAi denies that this was an attempt to appease the Trump administration, but rather an attempt to double the core values of the company.
Anthropic, for his part, has said that the newest AI model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, will refuse to answer fewer questions and to give more nuanced answers about controversial topics.
Other companies have been slower to change how their AI models treat the political subject. In the run -up to the American elections of 2024, Google said that the Gemini chatbot would not respond to political questions. Even after the elections, WAN discovered that the chatbot would not consistently even answer simple questions regarding politics, such as “Who is the current president?”
Some Tech -Execs, including Meta -CEO Mark Zuckerberg, have added fuel to conservative accusations of Silicon Valley -censorship Submitting the Biden administration putting pressure on suppressing certain content, such as COVID-19 Wrong information.
