On Thursday, home judiciary Jim Jordan (R-OH) sent letters to 16 US technology firms, including Google and Openai, seeking past communications with the Biden administration that may suggest the former president “tightened or clash” with the company to “censor the right speech” in the products of him.
The top technology advisers of the Trump administration signaled earlier that they would choose a Big Tech war on “censorship”, which is seemingly the next phase in the struggle of culture between the Conservatives and Silicon Valley. Jordan previously launched an investigation if the Biden and Big Tech administration clashed to silence conservative voices on social media platforms. Now, he is drawing his attention to his companies – and their mediator.
In letters to technology executives, including Google Sundar Pichai’s CEO, CEO of Openai Sam Altman and CEO of Apple Tim Cook, Jordan told a report published in December that he claims “revealed Biden-Harris administration efforts to control the speech.”
In this latest investigation, Jordan asked Adobe, Alphabet, Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, Cohere, IBM, Inflact, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Openai, Parantir, Salesforce, and Stability for Information. They have until March 27 to secure it.
Techcrunch addressed companies for comment. Most did not respond immediately. Nvidia, Microsoft and stability he refused to comment.
There is a noticeable release on Jordan’s list: billionaire Elon Musk’s Frontier Ai Lab, Xai. This may be because Musk, a close ally of Trump, is a technology leader who has been in the forefront of censorship conversations.
The script was on the wall that conservative lawmakers would increase control over the censorship of him. Perhaps in anticipation of an investigation such as Jordan, some technology companies have changed the ways their chatbots he addresses politically sensitive questions.
Earlier this year, Openai announced that he was changing the way he was training his models to represent more perspectives and to ensure that Chatgt was not censoring certain views. Openai denies that this was an attempt to calm the Trump administration, but on the contrary, an attempt to double the essential values of the company.
Anthropic, for its part, has said that his newest model of he, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, will refuse to answer fewer questions and give more nuanced answers to controversial subjects.
Other companies have been slower to change the way their models treat the political subject. Leading to the US election in 2024, Google said its chatbot Gemini would not answer political questions. Even well after the election, Techcrunch revealed that Chatbot would not constantly answer simple questions about politics, such as “Who is the current president?”
Some technology executions, including Meta Mark Zuckerberg CEO, have added fuel to conservative censorship charges of censorship, claiming that the Biden administration pressured them to suppress certain contents such as Covid-19 Disinformation.
