Senators Call on the FTC to Investigate Claims Against Walmart and Amazon’s AI Chatbots
The move follows a report that these online shopping tools are intentionally making it difficult to buy American-made on their platforms.
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The move follows a report that these online shopping tools are intentionally making it difficult to buy American-made on their platforms.
The chatbots run on artificial intelligence on Walmart and Amazon’s retail platforms are getting some attention from the U.S. Senate.
Sens. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.) and Rick Scott (R-Fla.) are calling on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate after a July report released by Columbia University researchers contended the AI-powered shopping assistants at the two enormous retailers were obscuring American-made product options while promoting imports.
“If Americans want to buy products made in America, Amazon and Walmart should be helping them, not giving away their business to foreign knockoffs,” Sen. Baldwin told the Wall Street Journal.
Indeed, the Columbia report – produced by a policy center co-founded by former FTC Chair Lina Khan – makes some concerning allegations about what country-of-origin product information these retail chatbots have access to, how they sort it, and how they ultimately display search results to consumers. Researchers even documented how Walmart’s bot told them that while flagging the long known Made in USA fraud on its platform is technically feasible, but “the practical pressure to build proactive compliance systems has been limited. That’s a business calculation, not a legal justification.”
This clearly didn’t sit well with Baldwin and Scott. From their letter:
“As two of the largest retail companies in the world, Amazon and Walmart’s potential noncompliance with federal standards and their explicit promotion of overseas and potentially fraudulent sellers on their online marketplaces and through their AI shopping chatbots is deeply concerning. … American manufacturers who adhere to [Made in America] standards and support other domestic suppliers deserve a fair playing field on these online marketplaces. Likewise, consumers who seek out Made in the USA products should be able to rely on accurate country-of-origin information when making purchasing decisions. New technologies such as AI shopping chatbots must preserve that fairness.”
Sen. Baldwin has been a vocal advocate for American manufacturing on Capitol Hill. In fact, she’s behind the Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) Online Act, which would require that all goods sold online in the United States list their country of origin, just as it’s required in brick-and-mortar stores. Sen. Scott is the legislation’s co-sponsor and it has the Alliance for American Manufacturing’s (AAM) endorsement.
You can read find the entire Columbia University report on Amazon and Walmart’s purported Made in America-phobic chatbots here, Sens. Baldwin and Scott’s letter to the FTC here, and AAM own FTC letter on the subject here.
