The House Republican Party summons tech giants for evidence on how Biden allegedly influenced artificial intelligence.
Jim Jordan has found a new way in his long-standing quest to prove that the tech industry is against conservatives.
On Friday, Representative Jim Jordan, Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee, intensified his investigations into major tech companies by issuing subpoenas to 16 important tech firms. These subpoenas aim to determine whether the federal government has pressured these companies to use artificial intelligence to "censor legal free speech," thereby opening a new front in his prolonged quest to prove that the tech industry is working to silence conservatives.
In the letters accompanying the subpoenas, Jordan requested that the companies—among them Adobe, Alphabet, Amazon, Anthropic PBC, Apple, Cohere, International Business Machines Corp., Inflection AI, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, Palantir Technologies, Salesforce, Scale AI, and Stability AI—preserve all documents related to the Biden-Harris administration. He is particularly interested in how and to what extent the executive branch has allegedly coerced or colluded with AI companies and other intermediaries to censor legal free speech.
The basis of his demand rests on the assertion that algorithms could discriminate not only against conservatives online but also in everyday situations involving artificial intelligence, encompassing everything from hiring practices to content generation. Referring to a report presented last December, which documented cases where Biden officials allegedly pressured private companies to "promote equity," stop "algorithmic discrimination," and "mitigate the production of harmful and biased outcomes," Jordan demanded the submission of all email communications with third parties, whether governmental or not, from January 2020 to January 2025. This includes any references related to moderation, removal, suppression, restriction, or reduced circulation of content, inputs or outputs of an AI model, training data set, algorithm, system, or product.
The subpoenas represent the latest move by the Republican Party in its ongoing investigation into the suppression of right-leaning ideologies on tech platforms, focusing on potential interference by the Biden administration in recent years. However, this inquiry is particularly broad: the general request for any documents discussing content restrictions related to AI over the past five years, along with the focus on software companies that are not media platforms, such as Adobe, Nvidia, and Palantir, indicates an escalation in the party's confrontation with the industry.
