The complaint arrived in the form of a letter, and it was pointed at the software the country’s two biggest retailers now ask shoppers to trust. Senators Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin and Rick Scott of Florida asked the Federal Trade Commission this week to investigate whether Amazon and Walmart are using their AI shopping assistants to steer customers away from American-made goods.
The senators’ request follows a report finding that the companies’ chatbots — Alexa for Amazon and Sparky for Walmart — decline to surface products labeled “Made in the USA” when shoppers search for them, even though the tools can find those items in inventory. The report also said the retailers fail to report products fraudulently labeled as American-made, despite having the technical ability to detect the mislabeling.
Baldwin, a Democrat, and Scott, a Republican, want the FTC to examine the use of the AI tools and step up enforcement against false Made in the USA claims. “As two of the largest retail companies in the world, Amazon and Walmart’s potential noncompliance with federal standards and their explicit promotion of overseas and potentially fraudulent sellers on their online marketplaces and through their AI shopping chatbots is deeply concerning,” the senators wrote.
The letter frames the dispute as a fairness question. American manufacturers that follow the labeling rules, and the suppliers that support them, deserve a level field on the marketplaces, the senators argued. Consumers who actively seek out American-made products should be able to trust what a chatbot tells them about where a product was made.
The FTC has long treated the Made in the USA standard as a consumer-protection matter, not a preference. Its rules require that a product labeled as such be “all or virtually all” made in the United States, and the agency has issued warning letters and pursued enforcement against companies that stretch the claim.
The agency’s authority is well established. The FTC has for decades enforced the standard that a product labeled Made in the USA must be “all or virtually all” American-made, and it has sent warning letters and levied penalties against companies that stretched the claim. In recent years the commission has also signaled it will scrutinize how artificial-intelligence tools treat consumers, warning companies that automation is no defense against deception. The senators are asking the agency to extend that scrutiny to the recommendation engines that now sit between shoppers and the products they see.
The letter is the latest sign that the chatbots have become a regulatory fault line. As Amazon and Walmart push shoppers toward conversational assistants that summarize options rather than listing them, the question of what those assistants choose to show — and what they quietly leave out — has moved from a design decision to a compliance issue. A search box returns everything; a chatbot returns what its model decides is relevant, and no customer can see the inventory that was filtered away.
The letter is also notable for who signed it. Baldwin, a Wisconsin Democrat, and Scott, a Florida Republican, rarely line up on retail policy, and their joint request gives the FTC political cover to act without appearing to pick a side. The bipartisan framing turns what could have been a partisan complaint about manufacturing into a consumer-protection demand, the kind of issue the commission can pursue without controversy.
The senators’ concern is that country-of-origin information is being lost in that filtering. The Made in the USA label carries measurable value, and retailers have a commercial incentive to steer traffic toward whatever is cheapest to ship or most profitable to sell, which is often imported. The lawmakers are effectively asking whether the bots are reinforcing that incentive while the humans who wrote the rules look the other way.
Amazon and Walmart have both said they comply with applicable law and support American manufacturing. Walmart has described Sparky as a tool to help shoppers save time, and Amazon has said Alexa is designed to help customers find what they need. Neither company has said it will change how the assistants handle origin labels, according to the report the senators cited.
Both companies pointed to their support for U.S. manufacturers in response to the report. Amazon said it features American-made goods across its marketplace, and Walmart said its shelves carry thousands of products from U.S. suppliers. Neither directly addressed why the chatbots, as the report described, declined to surface those products when asked.
The request does not force the FTC to act. The commission has discretion over which investigations to open, and a letter from two senators carries no legal weight on its own. But it adds political momentum behind a question that has been building for months: whether the algorithms that now guide the majority of online shopping should be held to the same truth-in-labeling standards as the products they recommend.
For the senators, the ask is narrow but the principle is broad. They want the agency to determine whether the country’s two largest retailers are using automation to bury information that shoppers are legally entitled to. The answer, if it comes, will say something about who is responsible when a chatbot makes a decision a shelf label never would.
