AAM Asks the FTC to Investigate Whether AI Shopping Tools Are Ignoring Made in America Products

“If marketplace AI systems are steering consumers toward foreign-made goods, obscuring reliable Made in USA information, or failing to surface domestic alternatives, they risk turning public concern about AI into a concrete marketplace harm.”

The Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM) is calling on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate the shopping tools attached to some huge online retail platforms, following explosive allegations that artificial intelligence (AI) is being used to divert consumers away from American-made products.

You’ve gotta remember this one. In late July a report released by a Columbia University Law School program found the AI chatbots that Amazon and Walmart have plugged into their shopping apps and websites are intentionally suppressing “Made in USA” products in their search results. What’s more, the report found those chatbots could detect instances of “Made in USA” fraud in their inventories … but don’t.

Why?

Walmart’s chatbot told the researchers it doesn’t “because the legal risk has historically been low—the FTC [Federal Trade Commission] pursues relatively few cases against retailers (as opposed to manufacturers), so the practical pressure to build proactive compliance systems has been limited. That’s a business calculation, not a legal justification.”

“Ask Amazon’s own chatbot why it does not act, and it will not blame a technical limitation. Instead, it points to its seller base—of which 40% to 50% is based in China—and says a real ‘Made in USA’ filter ‘would visibly redirect shoppers away from a very large portion’ of the site’s products,” concludes the report. “In other words, the AI has been tuned to protect the visibility of Chinese-manufactured goods over American ones. That is a design choice made by an American company, running American AI, fraudulently sold to American shoppers at the expense of American manufacturers.”

There are laws that apply to this sort of activity. In our letter to the FTC, AAM notes “the Commission has long recognized that country-of-origin claims are material to consumer purchasing decisions. The FTC’s Made in USA standard requires that unqualified Made in USA claims be truthful and substantiated, and that products marketed as Made in USA be ‘all or virtually all’ made in the United States.”

What’s more, “the Commission also has broad authority under Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act to police unfair or deceptive acts or practices, including misleading advertising and representations that affect consumer purchasing decisions.”

In short: The FTC should do something about this.

Concerns about AI are roiling the United States right now. December 2025 polling conducted by Morning Consult found that nearly seven in 10 respondents were concerned that AI could negatively impact domestic manufacturing employment. That should matter to the FTC, we write, because “Americans are not merely concerned about AI in the abstract.” From the letter:

“[Americans] are concerned that AI systems could be deployed in ways that weaken job creation, disadvantage domestic production, and further tilt markets against American workers and manufacturers. Those concerns become more immediate when AI shopping tools appear to make it easier for consumers to find products made in China while failing to provide comparable visibility for products made in the United States. If marketplace AI systems are steering consumers toward foreign-made goods, obscuring reliable Made in USA information, or failing to surface domestic alternatives, they risk turning public concern about AI into a concrete marketplace harm.”

We list several questions the FTC should explore regarding these AI shopping tools, including (but not limited to):

1. Whether they provide accurate and consistent country-of-origin information when consumers request Made in USA products, Made in China products, or products from other foreign sources;

2. Whether they’re more likely to identify, recommend or promote foreign-made products, including products made in China, than comparable American-made products; and

3. Whether representations that country-of-origin information is unavailable or inaccessible are accurate when such information appears elsewhere on the platform, can be inferred from product data, seller disclosures, import information, or listing content, or appears on an imported article or its container.

The whole letter can be found here.

And, it should be noted, there is an existing legislative proposal to modernize U.S. country-of-origin laws. AAM supports Sen. Tammy Baldwin’s (D-Wisc.) Country of Origin Online Labeling (COOL) Online Act, which would require clear country-of-origin disclosures for products sold online, giving consumers the same basic transparency in digital marketplaces that they receive in brick-and-mortar stores. The findings of that Columbia report are just more evidence the COOL Online Act should be passed by Congress and signed into law.