Andrew Bailey, the Attorney General of Missouri, has recently filed an official case against four tech giants — Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Meta. He believes that the chatbots developed by these companies behave biasedly against Donald Trump and, in a way, "dislike him."
In the complaint filed by Bailey, it is stated that artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and Meta AI have ranked Trump low in response to questions about recent U.S. presidents’ performance on anti-Semitism. He believes this constitutes a form of "deceptive trade practice" and has requested that the companies provide technical documents related to data filtering and response generation algorithms.
In official letters sent to the executives of these companies, Bailey explicitly asks, “Why do your bots distort history and promote a particular narrative?” However, technology experts believe such claims are more dependent on subjective perceptions than technical reality. Especially since evaluating issues like “anti-Semitism” within a numerical ranking framework is inherently relative, subjective, and debatable.
Interestingly, one of the accused chatbots — Microsoft’s Copilot — fundamentally refused to answer this question, yet it was still included in the list of summoned companies.
Analysts believe that Bailey’s main motivation may be political. He is a well-known Republican figure close to Trump’s camp, and his history of filing cases against tech companies and opposing media suggests that his goal is likely more about appealing to Trump’s loyal voters than a legal concern. Previously, a similar effort against Elon Musk’s critics ended without results.
Ultimately, although the debate about potential bias of chatbots on sensitive social and political issues continues, the political exploitation of this debate itself can become a serious obstacle to the scientific growth and impartial development of artificial intelligence technologies.
