Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) pressed the CEO of one of the largest artificial intelligence companies on Google's stake in the company and the search engine's growing control of the industry.

Hawley questioned Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, on Tuesday during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on artificial intelligence regulations. The Missouri Republican noted the power of incorporating Claude, Anthropic's chatbot, into Google Search and how that could be used to focus and control users' attention.

SECRET SERVICE: BIDEN DOG WOULD BE ‘PUT DOWN’ IF NOT PRESIDENT’S PET

Hawley called attention to the $300 million invested by Google and asked if Google's investment was detrimental to consumers in the United States because of its influence over the industry.

Anthropic's relationship with Google is "primarily focused on hardware," Amodei told Hawley.

"Search is all about getting and keeping users' attention," Hawley argued. "It's how Google makes money. I'm just imagining [Anthropic's] technology, a generative A.I. aligned and folded into search, the power it would give Google to get users' attention, keep their attention, push information to them."

Hawley said that such a prospect is "scary," and raised the hypothetical that Google search could be manipulated using artificial intelligence to sway the opinions of huge numbers of voters and swing an election.

Amodei responded by noting the specific methods it uses to ethically train Claude, known as "constitutional A.I.," would set a series of pre-determined values to define what answers or content are presented to the user.

Hawley appeared unconvinced, arguing that the ethical principles used to define the bot's conduct are in the "eye of the beholder" and that they would likely be defined by whoever owns the bot, such as Google or Microsoft.

Google invested $300 million into Anthropic in late 2022 and received a 10% stake in exchange, according to the Financial Times. Google is also Anthropic's "preferred cloud provider," according to a February 2023 blog post. The relationship resembles that of OpenAI and Microsoft, who invested $10 billion into the startup in January. Google has also invested in its own efforts to develop artificial intelligence, including Google Bard.

Anthropic is not as well known as other A.I. developers currently but was one of seven tech companies that committed to adopting a series of guardrails that would protect user data.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Amodei was joined in testifying by British professor of computer science Stuart Russell and Yoshua Bengio, the founder and scientific director of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms.