Erie Meyer and Zachary Harris at Columbia Law’s Center for Law and the Economy tested the platforms’ automated shopping assistants, Amazon’s Alexa for Shopping and Walmart’s Sparky, to determine how they handle origin claims. Their findings (first spotted by Reuters) expose a stark divide between what these AI systems know and what they actually tell buyers. In listing after listing, products trumpet "Made in USA" in bold title text while quietly acknowledging imported origins in fine-print specification fields. A screenshot of an exchange between an author and Walmart’s Sparky AI chatbot. For decades, FTC guidelines have required strict adherence to origin claims, mandating that products advertised as American-made contain all or virtually all U.S.-sourced parts and labor .