House GOP Subpoenas Tech Giants Over Alleged AI Censorship Pressure from Biden Administration

Republican Congressman Jim Jordan asks Big Tech if Biden tried to censor AI | TechCrunch

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 advisers previously signaled it 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'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. 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 them to suppress certain content like COVID-19 misinformation.

House GOP subpoenas Big Tech for evidence that Biden made AI woke

Tina Nguyen a Correspondent for The Verge, covering the Trump administration, Elon Musk's takeover of the federal government, and the tech industry's embrace of the MAGA movement. On Friday, Rep. Jim Jordan, the Republican Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, upped his investigations into Big Tech by sending subpoenas to 16 major tech companies, asking whether the federal government had pressured them into using artificial intelligence to "censor lawful speech" - a new front in his long-running quest to prove the tech industry is out to silence conservatives. In letters accompanying the subpoenas, Jordan asked the companies - Adobe, Alphabet, Amazon, Anthropic PBC, Apple, Cohere, International Business Machines Corp., Inflection AI, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Open AI, Palantir Technologies, Salesforce, Scale AI, and Stability AI - to preserve all documents between them and the Biden-Harris administration that showed "how and to what extent the executive branch coerced or colluded with artificial intelligence (AI) companies and other intermediaries to censor lawful speech." The core of their claim: algorithms could be used to discriminate against right wingers not just online, but in any everyday use case for AI, from hiring practices to generative content. Citing a report filed last December, in which the committee found several alleged examples of Biden officials "pressuring private companies to 'advance equity,' stop 'algorithmic discrimination,' and 'mitigate the production of harmful and biased outputs,'" Jordan demanded they produce any and all emails with a third party, government or otherwise, between January 2020 and January 2025, "referring or relating to the moderation, deletion, suppression, restriction, or reduced circulation of the content, input, or output of an AI model, training dataset, algorithm, system, or product." The subpoenas are the latest move in the GOP's long-running and innumerable investigations into whether tech companies were suppressing right-wing ideology on their platforms, and narrowed in on potential interference from the Biden administration over the past several years. But this inquiry is particularly vast: its broad request for any document that ever discussed AI content restrictions over the past five years, as well as its targeting of software companies that are not media platforms, such as Adobe, Nvidia and Palantir, represents the party's escalation against the industry.

House GOP subpoenas tech companies over AI 'censorship pressure' from Biden administration

The Republican-led House Judiciary Committee is looking into whether the Biden administration tried to "censor" artificial intelligence. Representative Jim Jordan has sent subpoenas to sixteen different tech companies that work with AI in some capacity to ask for any and all communications from the previous administration about limiting "harmful bias" and "algorithmic discrimination." Subpoenas were sent to Adobe, Alphabet, Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, Cohere, International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), Inflection AI, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Open AI, Palantir, Salesforce, Scale AI and Stability AI, and each requests an extensive amount of information, covering five years from January 1, 2020 to January 20, 2025. Essentially any and all documents and communications "referring or relating to the moderation, deletion, suppression, restriction, or reduced circulation of the content, input, or output of an AI model, training dataset, algorithm, system, or product," need to be included, whether between the companies and the previous administration, internal communications about those discussions or discussions with third-parties. Jordan and the committee are alleging that the former President's executive order calling for regulations on algorithmic discrimination and guidelines for how the federal government will use AI pressured private companies to censor speech. Digging up old documents and communications is an attempt to connect those seemingly distant dots. Pestering tech companies is not exactly new for Jordan. Just last week he subpoenaed Google over separate censorship concerns, and over the last few years he's regularly made a show of bringing in tech CEOs to testify about moderation. The main difference now is that companies that don't even run speech platforms like Adobe or Nvidia are receiving scrutiny, too.