Americans across the political spectrum are meeting the Federal Trade Commission’s proposal to begin regulating ideological bias in AI systems with deep skepticism.

Under the Donald Trump administration, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been busy investigating alleged online censorship across big tech platforms.

In February, for instance, the commission’s chairman, Andrew Ferguson, wrote to Apple's chief Tim Cook, warning that the company could be violating consumer protection law by suppressing news articles from conservative publications.

Trump, who selected Ferguson, likes him and once wrote on Truth Social: “Andrew has a proven record of standing up to big tech censorship, and protecting freedom of speech in our great country.”

“Unfair and deceptive practice”

Speaking of free speech, though, one could say – and comedian Jon Stewart indeed did – that the current administration mostly cares about their speech rather than free speech for all.

That’s because while the government and Trump himself have consistently and fiercely defended the right to express conservative views, it has also tried to silence and go after those who don’t parrot them.

This time, the FTC is targeting none other than AI models. Since multiple studies show that most major chatbots mostly lean left-of-center, the right-wing administration wants to fix this with specific regulations.

In July, the FTC released a proposed policy statement and said it was considering treating ideological bias in AI systems as an “unfair and deceptive practice” under Section 5 of the FTC Act.

The Federal Trade Commission is seeking public comment on a proposed policy statement addressing concerns that AI companies may be manipulating the behavior of their AI systems contrary to reasonable consumer expectations for objectivity and accuracy,

The FTC press release reads.

The FTC then invited the public to submit comments to the proposal, which, by the way, doesn’t actually explain how the agency would determine when ideological bias exists in AI systems.

Six weeks later, those comments are public. There are around 300 of them, and most oppose the proposal no matter which side of the political spectrum their authors belong to.

Why does AI deserve special treatment?

The most common concern is that the FTC could establish a precedent allowing the Trump White House and upcoming administrations to reshape AI systems to reflect their political views. Furthermore, the whole idea just seems a little ridiculous.

“The FTC is trying to judge AI models’ accuracy and performance – two largely subjective variables – in the same way it evaluates dietary supplements’ medical-benefit claims or users being charged fees without proper notice or consent. This is an absurd comparison,” wrote Jennifer Huddleston, David Inserra, and Juan Londoñ of the Cato Institute, for example.

An anonymous commenter, “F, J” adds that to him, the framework just seems selectively applied.

“The FTC has never proposed truth enforcement for social media, search engines, cable news, or talk radio – all of which influence consumer decisions at a massive scale and have demonstrably spread false information,” they wrote.

“The Commission owes the public a principled explanation for why AI specifically warrants content-level regulation that no previous information medium has faced.”

Besides, the proposal doesn’t even define accuracy. What happens when scientific consensus conflicts with current political positions? Are inconvenient facts bias? The statement’s silence on this doesn’t seem neutral.

As Anthropic, one of the biggest AI firms out there, helpfully explained in the spring, if AI chatbots seem too liberal or simply biased, that’s because the training data disproportionately represents mainstream Western journalism, academic writing, and institutional consensus. All this can skew default tones.

Besides, AI developers usually apply guardrails to filter out hate speech, toxicity, or misinformation, so the models can be seen as risk-averse or “woke.”