America First Legal Foundation urged Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) to investigate what the group believes is an anticompetitive deal that made ChatGPT the sole generative AI chatbot integrated into the iPhone and other Apple products.
“America First Legal Foundation (“AFL”) requests that your committees investigate the exclusive arrangement between Apple Inc. and OpenAI that made ChatGPT the sole generative AI chatbot integrated into the iPhone and other Apple products. This arrangement constitutes potential textbook exclusive dealing between two monopolists that, worse, further suppresses competing political viewpoints,” Gene Hamilton, the president of the America First Legal Foundation, wrote to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jordan and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Grassley.
The America First Legal letter to the Judiciary chairman noted that AI platforms are increasingly becoming the dominant platform through which Americans access information, receive news, and form political opinions, which raises concerning questions considering OpenAI’s alleged leftist bias:
This is especially the case given the growing body of peer-reviewed academic research documenting that OpenAI’s ChatGPT exhibits a systematic left-leaning political bias. A 2025 study published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization found that ChatGPT displays significant political leanings when generating text and images, and that it has “repeatedly refused to generate content representing certain mainstream perspectives,” citing purported concerns over misinformation and bias. The Brookings Institution, hardly a conservative outlet, found that ChatGPT provides “consistent—and often left-leaning—answers on political/social issues.” OpenAI’s models “had the most intensely perceived left-leaning slant — four times greater than perceptions of Google[.]” University of Washington researchers have shown that even brief interactions with a biased AI chatbot measurably shift users’ political views—signaling the high stakes of chatbot ideological bias.16 Additional studies reaffirm the findings of bias in ChatGPT: “14 of the 15 instruments diagnose ChatGPT answers to their questions as manifesting a preference for left-leaning viewpoints.” [Emphasis added]
“The Apple-OpenAI arrangement practically ensures that, from an ease-of-use perspective, the only AI chatbot available to most American smartphone users exhibits systemic left-wing political bias,” Hamilton wrote.
The letter cites that X and xAI sued Apple and OpenAI in June 2024, believing that Apple and OpenAI’s exclusive agreement to have ChatGPT be the sole AI chatbot integrated in Apple products is anticompetitive. The letter also stated that this raises antitrust concerns, given both Apple’s predominant status in the smartphone market and ChatGPT’s dominance in the AI chatbot market:
Apple and OpenAI’s agreement is a stark example of exclusive dealing between two dominant market participants. Apple controls nearly 70 percent of the U.S. smartphone market8—akin to an arrangement the Department of Justice characterized as monopolistic in a 2024 antitrust complaint.9 OpenAI, in turn, allegedly controls at least 80 percent of the U.S. generative AI chatbot market through ChatGPT.10 The complaint argues that by denying competitors access to the billions of user prompts generated by the hundreds of millions of iPhones, the Apple and OpenAI agreement prevented competitors from accessing data that could train and improve their models.
Antitrust experts also said that default setting can often control how perceive the world.
Gail Slater, the former assistant attorney general for antitrust and the American Compass Competition and Technology Policy chair, told Breitbart News in a written statement, “The DOJ Google search case showed how phone defaults can be powerful from a competition standpoint. It will be interesting to see if this holds true for generative AI as it did for search. Either way, it is an issue worth thinking through because default settings can control how we think about everything, from politics to poetry.”
Given the many issues raised by Hamilton and America First Legal, they believe that it is best for Congress to investigate the deal between Apple and OpenAI.
“Congressional oversight is needed to examine the harms stemming from the combination of a smartphone monopoly with a generative AI monopoly, operating through exclusive dealing, to create a single, ideologically biased AI chatbot,” Hamilton concluded in his letter to Jordan and Grassley. “The Committees are uniquely positioned to shed light on these issues and to consider whether the existing statutory framework is adequate to address them. We urge you to investigate these matters.”
Read the full article here