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On Thursday, House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) sent letters to 16 American technology firms<\/a>, including Google and OpenAI, asking for past communications with the\u00a0Biden administration that might suggest the former president \u201ccoerced or colluded\u201d with companies to \u201ccensor lawful speech\u201d in AI products.<\/p>\n The Trump administration\u2019s top technology advisers previously signaled it would pick a fight with Big Tech over \u201cAI censorship<\/a>,\u201d 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<\/a> social media platforms. Now, he\u2019s turning his attention to AI companies \u2014 and their intermediaries.<\/p>\n In letters to technology executives including Google CEO Sundar Pichai, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Apple CEO Tim Cook, Jordan pointed to a report<\/a> his committee published in December that he claims \u201cuncovered the Biden-Harris Administration\u2019s efforts to control AI to suppress speech.\u201d<\/p>\n In this latest inquiry, Jordan asked Adobe, Alphabet, Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, Cohere, IBM, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI,\u00a0Palantir, Salesforce, Scale AI, and\u00a0Stability AI for information. They have until March 27 to provide it.<\/p>\n TechCrunch reached out to the companies for comment. Most didn\u2019t immediately respond. Nvidia, Microsoft, and Stability AI declined to comment.<\/p>\n There\u2019s one notable omission in Jordan\u2019s list: billionaire Elon Musk\u2019s frontier AI lab, xAI. That may be because Musk, a close Trump ally, is a tech leader who\u2019s been at the forefront of conversations about AI censorship<\/a>. <\/p>\n 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\u2019s, several tech companies have changed the ways their AI chatbots handle politically sensitive queries.<\/p>\n Earlier this year, OpenAI announced it was changing the way it trains AI models<\/a> to represent more perspectives and ensure ChatGPT wasn\u2019t censoring certain viewpoints. OpenAI denies this was an attempt to appease the Trump administration, but rather, an effort to double down on the company\u2019s core values.<\/p>\n 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.<\/a><\/p>\n 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\u2019t respond to political queries. Even well after the election, TechCrunch found that the chatbot wouldn\u2019t consistently answer even simple questions related to politics<\/a>, like \u201cWho is the current President?\u201d<\/p>\n 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n