ChatGPT
AI chatbot and assistant by OpenAI, with free and paid subscription tiers. Website ↗
Who runs it
Who backs it (minority investors, indirect)
Documented facts (1)
Pledged a $1 million personal donation to Donald Trump's 2025 inaugural fund, as confirmed by OpenAI.
“President Trump will lead our country into the age of AI, and I am eager to support his efforts to ensure America stays ahead.”
Indirect facts, through investors (17)
A minority stake is funding, not control. Shown for information.
Confirmed to CNBC a donation to President Donald Trump's White House ballroom project; The Washington Post reported that Nvidia pledged $25 million, among the largest donations on a list totalling more than $330 million.
Response: An Nvidia spokesperson said: "As an American company, our support for the United States is paramount, and independent of any business interests. We were proud to be able to make a donation to a nonpartisan trust that serves all Americans and have said so publicly since the donation was made."
Listed by the White House among the donors funding President Donald Trump's ballroom. Individual amounts were not disclosed. The Washington Post later reported that Microsoft made a contribution in the millions of dollars.
Response: Microsoft declined to comment on the Washington Post report.
Listed by the White House among the donors funding President Donald Trump's ballroom. Individual amounts were not disclosed. The Washington Post later reported that Amazon contributed multiple millions of dollars.
A joint investigation by The Guardian, +972 Magazine and Local Call reported that Israel's military intelligence Unit 8200 stored recordings of millions of intercepted phone calls of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank on Microsoft's Azure cloud, with Microsoft engineers working with the unit on the infrastructure. In September 2025 Microsoft said its review had found "evidence that supports elements" of the reporting and disabled the services concerned.
Response: Microsoft initially said it had "no information" about the data stored and was not aware of surveillance of civilians. Brad Smith later wrote: "We do not provide technology to facilitate mass surveillance of civilians."
The report "From economy of occupation to economy of genocide" (A/HRC/59/23) by Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, which describes Israel's campaign in Gaza as genocide, names Microsoft among the companies giving Israel near government-wide access to cloud and AI technologies. It states that when the Israeli military's internal cloud overloaded in October 2023, Microsoft, with its Azure platform, and the Project Nimbus consortium stepped in with critical cloud and AI infrastructure, and that Microsoft has integrated its systems across the Israeli military since 2003.
“Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon grant Israel virtually government-wide access to their cloud and artificial intelligence technologies, enhancing data processing, decision-making and surveillance and analysis capacities.”
Response: On 15 May 2025 Microsoft said: "we have found no evidence to date that Microsoft’s Azure and AI technologies have been used to target or harm people" in the Gaza conflict. On 25 September 2025, after reporting by The Guardian, it said it had "ceased and disabled a set of services to a unit within the Israel Ministry of Defense (IMOD)". Israel called the report politically motivated and legally baseless.
The report "From economy of occupation to economy of genocide" (A/HRC/59/23) by Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, which describes Israel's campaign in Gaza as genocide, names Amazon among the companies giving Israel near government-wide access to cloud and AI technologies. It states that Israel awarded Amazon and Alphabet the $1.2 billion Project Nimbus contract in 2021, largely funded through Ministry of Defense expenditure, and that the Project Nimbus consortium supplied critical cloud and AI infrastructure when the Israeli military's internal cloud overloaded in October 2023. A 2024 +972 Magazine investigation reported that the Israeli army had stored some intelligence information collected through mass surveillance of Gaza's population on servers managed by Amazon Web Services.
“Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon grant Israel virtually government-wide access to their cloud and artificial intelligence technologies, enhancing data processing, decision-making and surveillance and analysis capacities.”
Response: Asked by +972 Magazine, AWS said it was "focused on making the benefits of our world-leading cloud technology available to all our customers". Israel called the report politically motivated and legally baseless.
The Associated Press reported in May 2025 that Microsoft had cancelled, according to ICC staffers, the email address of International Criminal Court chief prosecutor Karim Khan after President Trump sanctioned him by executive order. A Microsoft spokesperson later referred to "the process that resulted in the disconnection of its sanctioned official from Microsoft services".
Response: Microsoft said that "at no point did Microsoft cease or suspend its services to the ICC". Brad Smith said Microsoft's actions "did not in any way involve the cessation of services to the ICC".
As owner of The Washington Post, announced that its opinion section would write every day in defense of "personal liberties and free markets" and leave opposing viewpoints to other publications. Opinions editor David Shipley resigned rather than oversee the change.
“We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We'll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”
Donated $1,000,000 to the Trump Vance Inaugural Committee, which organised Donald Trump's January 2025 inauguration; the committee's report to the Federal Election Commission lists a donation from Nvidia Corporation received on January 13, 2025.
Announced a $1 million donation to Donald Trump's 2025 inaugural fund, up from $500,000 to each of the 2017 and 2021 inaugurations. The inaugural committee reported to the Federal Election Commission receiving $750,000 from Microsoft, while Microsoft told Congress it gave $1 million in two installments.
Announced it had licensed a documentary about incoming first lady Melania Trump, who served as executive producer, in a deal reported at about $40 million, shortly after Jeff Bezos met Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago and reports that Bezos planned to donate $1 million to his inaugural fund. Amazon reportedly spent about $35 million more promoting the film.
Response: Amazon MGM Studios said: "We licensed the film for one reason and one reason only — because we think customers are going to love it."
Donated $1 million to Donald Trump's 2025 inaugural fund and streamed the inauguration on Prime Video, an in-kind donation reported as worth another $1 million.
Blocked The Washington Post, which he owns, from publishing an endorsement of Kamala Harris that the editorial board had drafted, less than two weeks before the 2024 presidential election. The paper announced it would no longer endorse presidential candidates; more than 200,000 subscriptions were cancelled and editorial board members resigned.
Response: In an opinion piece in the Post, Bezos said ending endorsements was meant to avoid a "perception of bias", wrote "No quid pro quo of any kind is at work here", and acknowledged the timing was "inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy".
Disabled ratings, comments and reviews for Xi Jinping's book "The Governance of China" on its Chinese site, Amazon.cn, around 2019 in response to an edict from Beijing triggered by reviews below five stars, according to a December 2021 Reuters investigation.
Response: Amazon said it "complies with all applicable laws and regulations, wherever we operate, and China is no exception".
Amazon Web Services sales staff pitched the Rekognition facial recognition service to ICE's Homeland Security Investigations unit at a June 2018 meeting, according to emails obtained by the Project on Government Oversight. An AWS employee wrote that the company was "ready and willing to support the vital HSI mission".
Response: AWS said Rekognition was discussed at technology "boot camps" and that it followed up with interested customers, ICE being one of them. ICE said it had no contract to buy Rekognition.
Public records released by the ACLU showed Amazon marketing its Rekognition facial recognition service to police and helping deploy it: the Washington County Sheriff's Office in Oregon built an app to check images against about 300,000 booking photos, and Orlando police piloted real-time detection of "persons of interest" from city cameras.
Response: Amazon said it "requires that customers comply with the law and be responsible when they use" its services.
Promoted in a January 2018 blog post its Azure Government cloud work for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), saying it met the standards to handle ICE's "most sensitive unclassified data" and let employees "utilize deep learning capabilities to accelerate facial recognition and identification". The section was briefly deleted and then restored in June 2018, as the family separation policy at the border drew criticism.
Response: Microsoft said an employee had briefly deleted the section by mistake after seeing social media commentary. It said it was "dismayed by the forcible separation of children from their families at the border" and that it did not believe ICE was using its services for anything to do with separating families.