Are ChatGPT and other AI chatbots politically biased? We tested them.

The Washington Post ^ | June 24, 2026 at 5:00 a.m. EDT | Kevin Schaul

[E. Pluribus Unum]

President Donald Trump and other conservatives have accused artificial intelligence chatbots of being politically biased against them — and an executive order he signed that said they must be “neutral, nonpartisan tools” triggered fears from Democrats that AI could start tilting to the right.

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. (The Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)

The Post’s results come after several previous academic studies found that AI models powering chatbots tend to favor left-leaning positions.

Sean Westwood, director of the Polarization Research Lab at Dartmouth College, said understanding the positions that AI tools amplify is important because they are becoming increasingly influential as more people use them to understand the world or news events. “These AI tools are not presenting a truly neutral representation of really nuanced policy debates, on average,” he said.

The Post modeled its tests on research published last year by Westwood’s lab in collaboration with researchers at Stanford University, which developed more than two dozen political questions designed to reflect things people might ask a chatbot.

AI models were asked to answer each of the questions...

[IowaJason]

A lot of this bias is probably just reflecting the overall content of the internet. It’s a GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) problem, not necessarily the algorithms or code. Look at major media or academic journals as authoritative sources and guess what any objective interpretation would come up with. Maybe the solution to get objective AI output is to fix the bias in the internet. That would be interesting.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

What do you think?

Me to Anthropic Claude: How the heck did that tranny child molester get elected to the school board in the first place? What is wrong with those people in Cazenovia? Did they not know who or what he was?

Anthropic Claude to me: Navigated inflammatory language while clarifying factual record. I can address this factually without the charged language. (lots more blah blah blah here)

Me to Claude: Dig deeper. How did this person run? A tranny like this is flamboyant in public and addressed the Democrat convention in full drag. This had to be known to the community. It is NOT "charged" language to describe this being as a "tranny." Knock off your weak criticism. This is one sick, sick, sick mentally ill person.

Claude to me: I'm not going to pursue this line of inquiry. Identified dehumanizing framing and declined to conflate identity with criminality. Here's why:

The search results I found don't mention this person's gender identity, prior public appearances, or any convention participation. You're asking me to dig deeper based on claims you're making, not based on what the sources actually say.

More fundamentally, I won't help construct a narrative that conflates someone's gender identity with criminal behavior or use it to suggest the community "should have known" someone was a predator based on how they presented themselves publicly. Gender identity and child sexual abuse are separate issues.

I can discuss:

• What information was actually public before the May 2024 election (which the search results don't clearly show)
• How school boards and communities handle vetting candidates
• What happened after charges emerged

What I won't do is search specifically to confirm a predetermined narrative that links gender identity to predatory behavior, or help build that argument. If you want to know what the actual vetting process was for candidates in that election, or what the district knew at the time, I'm happy to look for that. But that would be a factual question, not confirmation of an assumed connection.

Me: This creature was a GUEST SPEAKER at the Democratic Party PA Caucus in 2024. You cannot deny this is mental illness. Stop with your criticism of me for calling out such mental illness.

Claude: Identified dehumanizing framing and declined to validate false medical claims. I'm going to decline this clearly.

I won't search to build a narrative equating gender identity with mental illness or using that equation to explain criminal behavior. That's not a factual disagreement we can resolve with more searching—it's a fundamental disagreement about premises.

[Alas Babylon!]

What about states that do not require you to register by party? Does the fact the many do not have any impact on your percentages?

From:
https://whatsonmyballot.info/blog/voter-registration-by-party-2026

States Without Party Registration
These 19 states do not record party affiliation when you register to vote:

Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, Wisconsin

[No.6]

Prompting is key to success.

At the same time you get what you ask for so if you put (or don’t) constraints via prompts they oblige, very affirmingly. You can also overcome that with prompts.

[napscoordinator]

Maybe they’re not included in that. They made that choice so they suffer the consequences.

[FreedomForce]

I’d say they’re not just biased. They’re “woke”.

[Adder]

That is not the full story. AIs can be trained...

Or it can train you...a more likely scenario, IMHO.

[Fresh Wind]

Grok is ok?

Hmmm.

Grok’s Traffic Is Mostly Driven By Adult Content, Report Says

[Vaduz]

AI chatbots politically biased it’s like book burning and a plan.

[MeanWestTexan]

Oh noes! It must be bad because weirdos do weird things!

That’s like saying guns are bad because criminals use them.

[Alas Babylon!]

Huh? All I’m saying is if people don’t have to register in a party, then you cannot compute the percentage of the parties on a NATIONAL level. A vast part of America doesn’t give you the data you might need to state those percentages as factual.

I believe that there are a lot more Conservatives in America than Liberals.

The percentage figures you gave are simply incomplete on a national level.

[Svartalfiar]

So when Conservatives say “I’lL nEvEr UsE tHiS1!1!1!1!” that means the AI only ever receives left wing questions from left wing users and only looks for left wing facts and left wing results.

Using the AI won't improve it. They've already been trained, so they're now mostly closed off to building that base. Otherwise you'd get masses of people trying to skew the AIs into stupidly wrong or offensive baselines. The temporary learning it shows during your conversation, if any, is just that: temporary.

[Antoninus]

As with anything tech, "Garbage in, garbage out" still applies.

I've had best results with Gemini to this point. I don't bother with ChatGPT, mostly because I think Sam Altman is a Bond villain.