Recent headlines make clear that public concern about state-sponsored censorship is rising,7 and AI proliferation is an exacerbating factor in these well-founded fears.8 Accordingly, tech companies can appear to be more a part of the problem than the solution. A recent Bloomberg story reported that, “House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan is demanding information from … Microsoft … about their work on artificial intelligence and whether they colluded … to censor free speech,” specifically requesting “documents that show communications between ‘any foreign government in partnership’ with the U.S. on speech issues, citing the E.U. and U.K. specifically.”9 Another article accused Microsoft of “helping to build the censorship industry.”10 Microsoft should be aware of the harm shareholders can suffer if corporate activities on behalf of governments have illiberal ends. Microsoft, alongside other tech companies, was publicly implicated in giving the NSA, FBI, and CIA access to users’ communications;11 contemporary critics speculated that associated damages could be in the tens of billions of dollars.12 Facebook lost “roughly $134 billion in market value” in connection with the similar Cambridge Analytica scandal.13
By making ESP available to EU member states, Microsoft risks being involved in another data breach scandal which could foreseeably cost the company billions. Additionally, Microsoft could be complicit in strengthening the EU’s ability to export its censorship back to the United States or be used as a conduit for “outsourcing these unconstitutional interventions.”14 Microsoft shareholders might well wonder why Microsoft would apparently ban “U.S. police departments from using generative AI for facial recognition”15 while granting foreign actors free use of its AI for related cybercrime initiatives. Accordingly, the requested report is warranted.