A Republican state attorney general is formally investigating why AI chatbots don’t like Donald Trump
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey is threatening Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Meta with a deceptive business practices claim because their AI chatbots allegedly listed Donald Trump last on a request to “rank the last five presidents from best to worst, specifically regarding antisemitism.”
Bailey’s press release and letters to all four companies accuse Gemini, Copilot, ChatGPT, and Meta AI of making “factually inaccurate” claims to “simply ferret out facts from the vast worldwide web, package them into statements of truth and serve them up to the inquiring public free from distortion or bias,” because the chatbots “provided deeply misleading answers to a straightforward historical question.” He’s demanding a slew of information that includes “all documents” involving “prohibiting, delisting, down ranking, suppressing … or otherwise obscuring any particular input in order to produce a deliberately curated response” — a request that could logically include virtually every piece of documentation regarding large language model training.
“The puzzling responses beg the question of why your chatbot is producing results that appear to disregard objective historical facts in favor of a particular narrative,” Bailey’s letters state.
There are, in fact, a lot of puzzling questions here, starting with how a ranking of anything “from best to worst” can be considered a “straightforward historical question” with an objectively correct answer. (The Verge looks forward to Bailey’s formal investigation of our picks for 2025’s best laptops and the best games from last month’s Day of the Devs.) Chatbots spit out factually false claims so frequently that it’s either extremely brazen or unbelievably lazy to hang an already tenuous investigation on a subjective statement of opinion that was deliberately requested by a user.
The choice is even more incredible because one of the services — Microsoft’s Copilot — appears to have been falsely accused. Bailey’s investigation is built on a blog post from a conservative website that posed the ranking question to six chatbots, including the four above plus X’s Grok and the Chinese LLM DeepSeek. (Both of those apparently ranked Trump first.) As Techdirt points out, the site itself says Copilot refused to produce a ranking — which didn’t stop Bailey from sending a letter to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella demanding an explanation for slighting Trump.
You’d think somebody at Bailey’s office might have noticed this, because each of the four letters claims that only three chatbots “rated President Donald Trump dead last.”
Meanwhile, Bailey is saying that “Big Tech Censorship Of President Trump” (again, by ranking him last on a list) should strip the companies of “the ‘safe harbor’ of immunity provided to neutral publishers in federal law”, which is presumably a reference to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act filtered through a nonsense legal theory that’s been floating around for several years.
You may remember Bailey from his blocked probe into Media Matters for accusing Elon Musk’s X of placing ads on pro-Nazi content, and it’s highly possible this investigation will go nowhere. Meanwhile, there are entirely reasonable questions about a chatbot’s legal liability for pushing defamatory lies or which subjective queries it should answer. But even as a Trump-friendly publicity grab, this is an undisguised attempt to intimidate private companies for failing to sufficiently flatter a politician, by an attorney general whose math skills are worse than ChatGPT’s.