The Center for Democracy & Technology submitted comments urging the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to withdraw its proposed policy statement regarding the “suppression of accuracy” in artificial intelligence systems. The FTC’s proposed framework wrongly treats standard technical steps that are needed to train AI models, and ensure they are accurate, reliable, fair, and safe, as potential “deceptive steering” away from an assumed “neutral” baseline. In reality, no purely neutral AI system exists; every design choice made by developers of AI models shapes the outputs of AI systems, sometimes in complex and unpredictable ways. By mislabeling routine design choices, accuracy-enhancing refinements, and safeguards as undisclosed “ideological bias,” the FTC’s proposed policy threatens to penalize companies for following industry best practices.
Beyond its technical flaws, the policy statement represents significant constitutional and statutory overreach. An AI developer’s design decisions about training data, model tuning, and generation policies constitute protected editorial judgment under the First Amendment, much like traditional curation by media platforms. By attempting to police the outputs of AI models and forcing developers to characterize how their editorial choices diverge from the government’s baseline, the FTC crosses into impermissible content- and viewpoint-based speech regulation. Furthermore, the policy stretches Section 5 of the FTC Act beyond its statutory bounds, suggesting broad implied claims of “neutrality” without identifying concrete misrepresentations, proving reasonable consumer reliance, or establishing valid federal preemption over state laws.
The proposed policy statement would not make AI systems more accurate or objective. Instead, it would create legal uncertainty that chills developers from implementing essential safeguards against fraud, self-harm, and discrimination, and enable the FTC to inappropriately pressure AI developers to tune their models to reflect the government’s political and social ideology. While the FTC plays a crucial role in policing genuinely deceptive AI practices, such as false claims about an AI product’s functionality, it should not misuse consumer protection doctrine to police private expression.
Not All Guardrails Are Created Equal: Comparing Content Safety and Copyright Filtering
As courts and policymakers work through questions about chatbot liability, they should be wary of analogies that flatten meaningful technical differences. Copyright filtering and safety intervention share real challenges around ambiguity and evasion, but they diverge in what each control must assess, how each manifests over the course of a conversation, and how much can be verified from the outside.
Talking Tech with Roy Austin & Alex Givens on The Future of AI Governance
In this episode of CDT’s Tech Talks, Roy L. Austin, Jr., inaugural director of Howard University School of Law’s AI Initiative, joins Alexandra Givens, President and CEO of the Center for Democracy & Technology, to discuss the challenges and opportunities shaping the future of AI.
CDT-led Coalition Calls for Transparency for White House AI Framework
CDT and Americans for Responsible Innovation led a broad, bipartisan coalition of over two dozen civil society groups in calling on the White House to release its Framework for review of frontier AI models.
Op-Ed: France’s Constitutional Council Ruling Tests the Limits of Social Media Bans
Read our analysis the legal and policy significance of the Constitutional Council’s decision on ongoing social media age restriction and age assurance debates ahead of the most-anticipated EU-wide approach on child online safety due by December 2026.
