Exclusive: Amazon's Alexa sparked controversy in early September when a viral video showed the virtual assistant explaining reasons to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris while refusing to offer similar responses for former President Trump. FOX Business has learned that Alexa generated the pro-Harris response before the company put an override in place.
Amazon representatives briefed staffers from the House Judiciary Committee about the incident and explained that Alexa utilizes pre-programmed manual overrides created by Amazon's information team to respond to certain prompts from users, according to a source familiar with the briefing. For instance, Alexa would tell users who asked for reasons to vote for Trump or President Biden that "I cannot provide content that promotes this specific political party or candidate."
Prior to the release of the viral video, Amazon had only programmed manual overrides for Biden and Trump, failing to add Harris because very few users were asking Alexa about reasons to vote for her, the source said.
From the time Harris entered the presidential race on July 21, when Biden withdrew, and Sept. 2, the day before Alexa's pro-Harris responses went viral, users had prompted Alexa to offer reasons to vote for Trump 14,000 times versus 225 times for Harris – a 6,000% difference.
AMAZON ALEXA GIVES STARKLY DIFFERENT ANSWERS WHEN ASKED WHY TO VOTE FOR TRUMP VERSUS KAMALA HARRIS
Amazon became aware of the issue with Alexa's pro-Harris responses within one hour of the video being posted on X and going viral. The company fixed the issue with a manual override for such questions about Harris within two hours of the video going up, according to the source.
Before the fix was deployed, Fox News Digital prompted Alexa with questions asking for reasons to vote for Harris and received a response saying that "she is a female of color with a comprehensive plan to address racial injustice and inequality throughout the country."
On another occasion, Alexa said, "Harris, a former prosecutor and attorney general, emphasizes her law and order credentials and promises a tough on crime approach to battling the violent crime wave that has swept the nation in recent years."
REP. JIM JORDAN REQUEST AMAZON BRIEFING OVER ALEXA'S TRUMP CENSORSHIP
The source said that Amazon apologized for Alexa's display of political bias at the briefing and said that while it has a policy that aims to prevent Alexa from "having a political opinion" or "bias for or against a particular party or particular candidate" but that "obviously we are here today because we did not meet that bar in this incident."
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The tech giant has since audited its system and now prevents Amazon from answering all election-related questions, with manual overrides in place for all candidates and election-related prompts. Previously, Alexa only had manual overrides for presidential candidates.
