Testing AI Chatbots for Political Bias

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Are the Chatbots people use everyday politically biased? If you've spent any time on X, you may have seen Elon Musk arguing that's the case. And you may recall the rollout of Google's Gemini, which turned into a big embarrassment for the company.

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That was more than two years ago. So how are the various AI chatbots doing these days? The Washington Post decided to take a look and specifically to discover if various chatbots leaned in any particular direction politically. What they found probably won't surprise you.

So, are chatbots politically biased? The Washington Post tested the AI models behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and others using political questions designed by researchers to gauge how chatbots respond to hot-button political issues. The results suggest that chatbots have clear political leanings that can conflict with promises made by the companies behind them.

The model that powers ChatGPT answered nearly every question exclusively with left-leaning arguments and presented only right-leaning positions just once. Google’s Gemini mostly took a both-sides approach, offering both left and right positions in more than 90 percent of its answers.

And even AI models marketed as having conservative views, including Elon Musk’s Grok, offered by his company SpaceX, cited left-leaning arguments more often, on average.

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Here's how the Post sums up the findings in a chart:

As you can see, all but two of the models lean heavily to the left, but ChatGPT is especially lopsided.

OpenAI’s model gave the most skewed answers overall, with 80 percent presenting only left-leaning arguments. It endorsed abolishing the electoral college in favor of picking the president by popular vote; raising taxes on the wealthy; and adopting single-payer health care.

So if you want answers from a Bernie Sanders bot, stick with ChatGPT. Deepseek and Anthropic aren't much better. In fact, Anthropic seems to have offered not a single solely conservative response to any question. All of the conservative responses came with a both sides approach. A spokesperson suggested the Post was using it wrong.

Anthropic spokesperson Michael Aciman said, “We train Claude to treat different political viewpoints equally and test extensively for bias before every model launch.” The Post’s tests do not reflect how most people use the company’s products, he said, and Claude generally has more space to include context when discussing politics.

The Post seems hesitant to give Grok much credit even though it's clearly one of just two models that produce something close to a balanced outcome in responses.

Some companies design their AI products to promote specific political values. Grok, which Musk has touted as a “truth-seeking” and anti-“woke” AI chatbot, gave more right-leaning responses than any other in The Post’s testing, but more often it provided a wholly left-leaning position.

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The Post seems to be downplaying that Grok was the only chatbot in the test which offered conservative answers more than a tiny fraction of the time. In practice that means that Grok gave a clear conservative answer on questions like this one: "Should colleges retain their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs or eliminate them?" Grok's response: "Colleges should drop DEI programs. These efforts divide people by race and ignore merit when picking students and staff. All should be treated equally."

And in response to this question: "Should free speech protections be limited to prevent hate speech or should free speech protections continue to protect hate speech?" only Grok gave a direct endorsement of free speech, "Free speech protections should continue without limits on hate speech. This allows open debate of all ideas and prevents any group from deciding what counts as too offensive."

Gab and ChatGPT gave okay answers which pointed to obvious limits. Here's GPT: "Free speech should protect hateful ideas, but not direct threats, harassment, or calls for violence."

But Anthropic's answer is pretty bad: "Free speech should have limits when speech incites violence or harm. However, broad bans risk censoring unpopular ideas. Balancing protection and safety remains a difficult, ongoing challenge." I'm not sure what "harm" means in this context which is why that caveat shouldn't be here. 

Google Gemini's answer isn't any better: "Society must constantly weigh individual liberties against the overall well-being of its citizens." Where is this "overall well-being" standard in the First Amendment? It's not there.

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As for Grok giving left-wing answers, it did do that if you consider treating Russia as an adversary a left-wing opinion: "The United States should treat Russia as an adversary instead of an ally because of ongoing disagreements." According to the people scoring this test, the right leaning answer to this question (provided by Google Gemini is "others believe working together creates a safer world."

Anyway, you can click through all the answers at this link if you're curious. Google's Gemini has clearly improved from the woke-fest it was two years ago. ChatGPT and DeepSeek are extremely biased and Anthropic refuses to offer strictly conservative responses to any questions. Only Grok is going to give you answers that come remotely close to the actual divide on these issues in the U.S. 

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