Made in the USA
By 
Speaking of AI, I found this amusing:
Perhaps you’re feeling patriotic during America’s 250th anniversary, and you just want to treat yourself to some fine American-made goods. It almost feels natural these days to start by browsing Amazon or Walmart, two of the largest retailers in the world, to see if there are any good deals on, say, fly-fishing reels.
Hoping to save time on Amazon, you turn to the retailer’s Alexa for Shopping AI chatbot to find a reliable, U.S.-made reel. “Sorry, I don’t have access to that information,” Alexa says. That’s weird. You adjust the query and remove the U.S.-made condition. At that point, Alexa comes through with an extensive selection. What that search did not yield, however, were the American-made products you were hoping for.
Erie Meyer and Zachary Harris, senior fellow and program manager at Columbia Law School’s Center for Law and the Economy, respectively, ran this exact query sequence as part of the methodology for a report investigating the capabilities of Amazon and Walmart’s chatbots to identify where the products on each of their platforms originate. According to the findings of that report, Amazon and Walmart, despite having the technical ability to detect which products are U.S.-made, suppress those products in search results generated by the retailers’ respective chatbots.
“In other words,” the authors write, “the AI has been tuned to protect the visibility of Chinese-manufactured goods over American ones.”
It’s a deliberate business strategy. The retailers’ own chatbots said as much. “The FTC pursues relatively few cases against retailers … That’s a business calculation, not a legal justification,” Walmart’s chatbot Sparky said in response to queries about whether Walmart was following the law.
“They can spot ‘Made in USA’ fraud on command,” Meyer said. “Hiding it was a choice and it shows the dangers of unregulated agentic shopping.”
To the ire of the 71 percent of Americans who intentionally seek out American-made products, neither Amazon nor Walmart offers a way to filter searches for countries of origin. Amazon and Walmart did not respond to the researchers, offer technical corrections, or dispute the findings of the report. (A petition asking Amazon to create a “Made in the USA” filter has amassed roughly 25,000 signatures since 2018.)
71% of Americans seek out Made in the U.S. products? That number surprised me. The number who would actually pay more for them…well, that would be an interesting experiment if only any consumer products were actually made in the U.S.