Amazon's Alexa Reportedly Shows Political Preference Error in Trump-Harris Presidential Race Queries

September 4, 2024

Amazon's voice assistant, Alexa, reportedly displayed politically biased responses when questioned about the 2024 U.S. presidential candidates. It failed to offer reasons for voting for Donald Trump, citing neutrality, while providing detailed endorsements for Kamala Harris. The company labeled this discrepancy as an 'error' and claimed it has since been corrected.

This incident underscores the importance of safe and secure AI practices and the need for robust governance. By joining HISPI Project Cerebellum, you can help shape trustworthy AI through our Govern, Map, Measure, and Manage functions in our AI incident database.
JOIN US

Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.611, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 4.2 — similarity 0.604, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.598, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: alexa-device-owners
Alleged developer: amazon
Alleged harmed parties: alexa-device-owners, donald-trump-presidential-campaign, donald-trump-supporters

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/778

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.