On Thursday, the judicial president of the House of Representatives Jim Jordan (R-OH) He sent letters to 16 American technology companiesIncluding Google and OpenAi, requesting past communications with the Biden administration that could suggest that the former president “coerced or colluded” with companies to “censor legal discourse” in AI products.
The main technology advisors of the Trump administration indicated previously that they would choose a fight with great technology for the “censorship of AI”, which is apparently the next phase in the cultural war between the conservatives and the Silicon Valley. Jordan previously directed an investigation into whether the Biden administration and the great technology colluded to silence conservative voices in Social Network Platforms. Now, he is directing his attention to AI and their intermediaries.
In Letters to Technology Executives, including the CEO of Google, Susso Pichai, the CEO of Operai, Sam Altman, and the CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, Jordan pointed out a report His committee published in December that he states that “he discovered the efforts of the Biden-Harris administration to control the AI to suppress the speech.”
In this last consultation, Jordan asked Adobe, Alphabet, Amazon, Anthrope, Apple, Cohere, IBM, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Openai, Palantir, Salesforce, Scale Ai and Stability ai to obtain information. They have until March 27 to provide it.
britcommerce contacted companies to comment. Most did not respond immediately. Nvidia, Microsoft and Stability AI declined to comment.
There is a remarkable omission in Jordan’s list: the frontier laboratory of multimillionaire Elon Musk, Xai. That may be due to Musk, a close ally of Trump, is a technological leader who has been at the forefront of conversations about AI censorship.
The writing was on the wall that conservative legislators would increase the scrutiny about the alleged censorship of AI. Perhaps in advance of an investigation such as Jordan’s, several technological companies have changed the ways in which their chatbots of ia handle politically sensitive consultations.
Earlier this year, Operai announced that he was changing the way he trains the AI models to represent more perspectives and ensure that Chatgpt did not censor certain points of view. Operai denies that this was an attempt to appease the Trump administration, but rather an effort to double the fundamental values of the company.
Anthrope, meanwhile, has said that his new AI model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, will refuse to answer fewer questions and give more nuanced answers about controversial subjects.
Other companies have been slower to change the way their AI models deal with the political issue. Before the US elections of 2024, Google said that his Chatbot Gemini would not respond to political consultations. Even after the elections, britcommerce discovered that the chatbot would not constantly answer even simple questions related to politics, such as “Who is the current president?”
Some technological executives, including the CEO of Meta Mark Zuckerberg, have added fuel to the conservative accusations of the censorship of Silicon Valley when claiming the Biden administration pressed to social media companies to Delete some content as the erroneous information of COVID-19.