The ‘free speech’ investigation goes hunting at Apple, OpenAI, and 14 other companies.
The ‘free speech’ investigation goes hunting at Apple, OpenAI, and 14 other companies.
Mar 14, 2025, 6:50 PM UTC
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Tina Nguyen
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.
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